? iROOKLYN EAGLE 
_, LIBRARY, 

Vol. XV. No. 5. MAY, 1900. Price, Five Cents 

WORKERS FOR THE TRUSTS 

Labor Conditions in the Great Manufacturing 
Centers of This Country 

Wages, Housing, and Industrial Altruism 



CHARLES M. SKINNER 


rXJI^I^TKT Ii:.I.-XJSTRATDE3D. 


PUBLISHED BY THE 

BROOKLYN DAILY EAGLE 


Entered at the Brooklyn-New York Post Office as Second Class Matter. Vol. XV, No. 5 of the Eagle Libraiy, 
May, 1900. Yearly Subscription .$1.00. Almanac Number, 2.5 cents. 











rooklyn Daily Eagle 
ook and job Printing 


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AND 


4-h:i> 


< 2 . 0 / 4 - 


Workers 


THE 


Trusts 


Labor Conditions 


IN THE 


Great Manufacturing Centers 


' OF THE 


r .i 


United States. 


WAGES, HOUSING AND INDUSTRIAL ALTRUISM. 


BY CHARLES M. SKINNER. 


FULLY ILLUSTRATED. 

COPYRIGHTED 1900. 

OFFICE OF PUBLICATION: 

EAGLE BUILDING, BROOKLYN. 


Entered at the Brooklyn-New York Post Office as Second Class Matter. Vol. XV, No. 5 of the Eagle Library, 
1900. Yearly Subscription, $1.00. Aliuaii««ic Number, 25 cents. 






















T HE Workers and The Trusts 


The Rubber Trust and Its Employes. 


A LITTLE 


The cry of unwilling labor 
has been sounding in the 
MnDAI 171 MO of men since the evp- 

MOnALIZING. speech. The 

millions pay a dear price for the indulgence of 
the social instlncl which has gathered them 
into towns and made necessary divisions and 
adjustments of work and responsibility. These 
have condemned the masses, who could be 
free in the country, and alone, to toll that is 
often severe, monotonous and ill paid. At the 
same time there is a great deal of sentimental 
flubdub as to the rights and wrongs of labor, 
and the loudest wailings seem to come from 
those who are well paid and not overworked. 
The doomed of Israel groaned, with reason, 
when they tugged at the stones for the pyra¬ 
mids and other tombs of their O'ppressors, in 
the blistering sun of desert Egypt, for they 
had a slave’s wage of a meal, a cover and the 
whip; but conditions have altered as vastly 
since then as the world has altered. 

While there are parts of this country where 
the toil is heavy and the pay means slow 
starvation, they are few, thank God, and 
growing fewer. Taking our Industrial his¬ 
tory, decade by decade, there has been an up¬ 
ward movement in wages and a downward one 
in the cost of living, excepting in the matter 
of tobacco and rent, and in the last quarter of 
a century many comforts and luxuries which 
before that time pertained to the rich have 
been made accessible to the multitude. Why, 
some tramps live better to-day than they did 
when they worked! And as to the attitude of 
employers and employed, the pictures that rep¬ 
resent capital as a monster with ogre’s teeth 
and tiger’s claws, and labor as a lamb faced 
iaaocent walking up sadly to be digested, 
have fewer and fewer admirers. Truth is, 
that the man at the desk and the man at the 
bench are average human beings and have 
more in common than either admits or 
knows until they come to the test of some 
great common fortune. Nobody wants to 
"grind the faces of the poor” in these days, 
and not many of the poor need to go to the 
grindstone to have their countenances pol¬ 
ished, if they don’t want to. 

Taking a broader view of the state of man, 
however, nobody would be so brash as to de¬ 
clare that the social system or lack of sys¬ 
tem is ideal; that labor receives all it earns; 
that laws are always Intelligent; that men are 
Individually so wise, so free, so happy as 
they will be, or that their dwellings are so 


healthy and beautiful as we wish. Let’s take 
a sample industry and look at it with unprej¬ 
udiced eye. Rubber will do. Recently the 
principal factories in the United States in 
which rubber is made were united in a trust, 
a corporation usually symbolized, west of 
the Missouri, as a Are breathing dragon. Yes, 
it has consumed some of the smaller indus¬ 
trial adventurers. There is no doubt of it. 
But in balancing accounts would their losses 
make as large a figure as do the gains to the 
public in cheapened product or in the more 
secure employment of the working people? I 
can’t say yet. I merely ask. 

The principal rubber fac- 
THE RUBBER tory in this country is at 

THIA/M Woonsocket, R. I.—a town 

lUWIM.j in that delicious land of 

pines and ponds, of pies, of queer steeples, of 
shaded streets, of well kept yards, of li¬ 
braries, crossroad schools and the Puritan so¬ 
brieties that surrounds Boston—^a land of 
homes. It is a town of industries, Woonsock¬ 
et is, with a well built, well stocked business 
center and 100 liquor saloons, to which sub¬ 
urbanites Joyfully resort whenever they have 
means. Oh, you think I’m Joking? No. 
Last year they arrested about 1,000 people, 
700 of them for drunkenness, and two-thirds 
of the total were from other places. Among 
the complaints against the other and sober 
300 were reveling, idleness, sleeping out, 
profanity, obscene language, running away 
and Sabbath breaking. Blackstone, two miles 
away,* a place of cotton mills, is charged 
with supplying many of the offenders. It has 
no police and is said to be troubled with loaf- 
erism and rowdyism, its moral status being 
lower than that of Woonsocket. Its industrial 
quarters are dirtier and less orderly; more 
broken panes are repaired with shingles and 
old hats than in Woonsocket; local pride is 
drowsy. Whether or not this has anything to 
do with the fact of rflatlvely lower wages 
it would be rash to state. 

Woonsocket is on the Blackstone River, said 
to be the busiest stream, for its length, in 
America. You cannot get away from it. It 
is all over the place. At least, it seems to be, 
for it describes a letter W in its meanderings. 
As to the streets, they Just happened. You 
start southward from your hotel, to take a 
walk, and pretty soon you find yourself ar¬ 
riving at the same hotel from the north. 
There is no city hall, but there is aa^-opera 


house where you may see “Crimes of Chlca* 
go,” “Peck’s Bad Boy,” or “Fanny Frlvol’s 
French Froliques,” and there is an Inevitable 
soldiers’ monument with a military gentle¬ 
man on top wearing stony w'hiskers and an 
air of sadness. The industries occur along 
the river—no longer reliable for power, since 
the forests have been destroyed—i& the form 
of machine shops, foundries, wringer works, 
yarn, cotton and woolen mills, and the rub¬ 
ber factory. The monthly wage bill in these 
factories is $250,000. 

lA/nDi/' rubber factory known 

WUnK as the Alice Mill, stands 

ANnWAnPQ ^ grassy reservation 
VVHUCO. surrounded by a fence. A 
watchman is at the gate to prevent unwar¬ 
ranted entrance. The buildings, erected ten 
years ago, are of brick, four stories high, bare 
and businesslike inside and out, save for a 
few plants that a Scottish workman keeps in 
three of the windows, and forgets to water. 
When running at full capacity this mill em¬ 
ploys 1,500 people and turns out 30,000 pairs 
a day of shoes and arctics. A branch estab¬ 
lishment at Millville, four or five miles away, 
turns out 8,000 pairs of boots dally. Work 
begins at 7 A. M. and continues till 6 P. M., 
with an hour’s intermission for dinner. Tha 
pay roll is $10,500 a week, and average earn¬ 
ings are said to be $8 for women, $10 to $11 
for men. In reckoning the cost of the pro¬ 
duct one must consider the material as well 
as the wage, because half of the expense is 
lor crude supplies, and this one mill uses up 
$250,000 worth of cotton cloth alone every 
year, beside netting, wool fleeces, buckles, 
buttons and what not. 

The legend of rubber is, that a traveler ia 
the South American Jungles being in the en¬ 
joyment of a large thirst and having nothing 
else to stop it with, tapped a tree and drank 
the sap. Soon after he swigged off what was 
left in his flask of whisky, and the alcohol 
combining with the sap Immediately formed a 
cake in his stomach that was heavier than 
ever was made by a young housekeeper in a 
comic paper. He was full of rubber. Now, 
rubber, being indigestible, was the undoing 
of him. He lost his elasticity of spirits, his 
stomach was no longer resilient when he 
tempted it with a steak, and he presently 
stretched himself out and Joined his ances¬ 
tors. This may be so, or- otherwise, and there 
is every reason to believe it is otherwise, for 
a man would have to be terribly thirsty be¬ 
fore he would care to drink the thick, gummy. 





4 


THE RUBBER TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


irn _ : : - : - ■ ■ _ 

milky sap, and possibly alcohol does not af¬ 
fect It that way, anyhow. Even if It did, a 
large drink of nitric acid or something of that 
kind might dissolve it again. 

As a matter of fact, rubber was known to 
the American natives before Columbus landed, 
and in the West Indies they played ball with 
it—honest!—and water proofed some of their 
clothes by smearing the sap over them. The 
Spaniards noticed this, but being Spaniards 
paid no further attention to it. They were 
here for gold and glory, and the idea of a 
rubber trust never entered their heads, be¬ 
cause that would have involved work. It was 
not until the first half of last century that 
any attempt was made to turn rubber to com¬ 
mercial account, and it Is only within forty 
or fifty years that it has become a really im¬ 
portant article of manufacture. Yet here is 


through, which marks the place where a stick 
was pulled out. For the way in which these 
biscuits are made is simple enough. The sap 
is collected in clay cups, the sticks are dipped 
in it, after it has been emptied into larger 
vessels, and are held over a fire so as to make 
it dry the quicker. By repeated dippings a 
biscuit is formed that is a foot thick, and in 
the later hours of the process it must surely 
require a couple of Indians to hold it. The 
pungent odor which clings to the crude sub¬ 
stance is derived from the wood and cones 
that are burned to dry it. Possibly one may 
come to like it, and evidently the operatives 
grow used to it, for they can be seen to smile 
and talk just like human beings in the street, 
but to a stranger coming upon it suddenly it 
suggests flight and a board of health. The 
smell is as nearly as possible like guano—a 


a week. That’s the reason why they cut the 
biscuits open, now, in order to remove the 
geological collections and make‘the red men 
feel more moral. The African rubber comes 
anyhow. It is poor, ragged stuff, that looks 
like pieces of old door mats and that you 
can tear almost like punk, while the Para 
product has all the resisting power of a 
boarding house steak, and has to be torn to 
pieces in a mexhine that would crush a rhi¬ 
noceros. 


WHERE THE 
MEN LABOR. 


But having investigated 
these preliminary matters, 
let us take a walk 
through the works. We 
will begin at the low buildings outside. Here 
is an 8,000 gallon tank of naphtha, filled di¬ 
rectly from the cars that enter the premises 



WOONSOCKET RUBBER COMPANY’S RUBBER SHOE MILL, AT WOONSOCKET, R. I. 

Wooden Building on the Right Was Formerly a Cotton Mill and Is One of the First Mills Erected in Woonsocket. 


one mill, of forty or fifty at least, which rep¬ 
resents the chief industry of one city and that 
makes goloshes enough to keep the feet of the 
whole city of New York dry. It began with 
wringers. They started a bashful little shop 
here to make rollers, and at almost regular 
Intervals, the market having been stocked, 
the works would shut down. Now they never 
stop, and as soon as the Filipinos and Kanak¬ 
as and I^jrto Ricans begin to plead for arctics 
and rubber bools the factory wull be en¬ 
larged. 

No advance, or, at least, no change, has 
been made in the matter of collecting the rub¬ 
ber. It comes to this country in “biscuits” 
—good, large biscuits such as mother never 
used to make, for they weigh from twenty to 
one hundred pounds, and are not appetizing 
either in appearance or odor. When cut open 
as most of them are, they show layers, like 
an onion, with a central cavity running 


fine, fishy, oily, dead ripe guano at that. The 
poorer the rubber the better it does not smell. 
In fact, the best, or Para rubber is hardly no¬ 
ticeable, by the nose, except in quantities, 
but the stuff that comes from Central Amer¬ 
ica and Africa is so loud that even lim- 
burger cheese and other delicatessen 
would lapse into noxious desuetude 
in its presence. Strong . men have been 
seen to retire into corners and cry when 
they were led among the bins. Queer shapes 
you find among the cheaper imports. Old 
shoes are common. They are made of pure 
gum, unvulcanized, by simply daubing the 
sap over a last. Indians wear that kind in 
Brazil. Other queer things are cannon balls 
and rocks. Because, you see, when a guile¬ 
less Indian finds that he can get, say, 25 cents 
a pound for rubber, he realizes that a ten 
pound rock in the middle of a biscuit is worth 
?2.50, or, enough to keep him intoxicated for 


on sidings, though the cars are a hundred 
yards or more away. The fluid runs through 
pipes. This is used in the varnish that makes 
new rubbers look so glossy. The man who 
stirs the varnish is liable to be blown up 
at any moment if his fire gets too hot, but he 
has been at it for years and is as placid as 
a policeman. Other compartments in the 
house are devoted to the mixing of cement, 
which is of pure rubber and naphtha, and to 
a stationary fire department, with steam al¬ 
ways on. Every usual precaution is made 
against fire on every floor. 


Now we come to the main building, and in 
tanks outside of it we find some tons of bis¬ 
cuits soaking in hot water. This softens 
them so that they can be more readily cut 
into pieces of a suitable size to put through 
the “cracker,” which a ma,n of slightly bent 
back and grizzled whiskers is attending. He 


















































































THE RUBBER TRUST AND ITS EMBLOYES. 5 


shovels the lumps into the jaws of this ma¬ 
chine—a couple of cylinders—and they de¬ 
liver it, a pale brown mass that has the 
seeming consistency of an old carpet. Not 
only does thp machinery break up the lumps, 
but water sunning through it cleans them, 
and In this process the best rubber loses 18 
per cent., while the African variety shrinks 40 
to 45 per cent. The lost material is dirt, 
sand and chips and other impurities. After 
the washing process the rough sheets and 
strips are put on wire racks and carried to 
rooms through which warm, dry air is blown, 
and there they stay for ten days. The longer 
they remain there the stronger and better 
they are, for rubber before vulcanizing is af¬ 
fected by moisture, and even the knives and 
shears used here penetrate it the more readily 
after they have been dipped in water. 

On its return from the drying room the 
sheets are "compounded” with certain pow¬ 
ders and other substances, the secret of these 
materials being in some factories closely kept, 
hut sulphur is supposed to be one of them. 
The stuff goes into the mixers, which run 
it once more through shining cylinders that, 
it is said, often have to exert a strength of a 
hundred horse power to get down a particu¬ 
larly thick morsel. Now and then, instead of 
falling into the trough below, the rubber will 
stick to the cylinder, and the workman then 
has to be spry and has to use a good deal of 
force to tear it, even from the polished steel. 
While it is passing through the powders are 
added, and are crushed into the gummy sub¬ 
stance. You are puzzled as you stand before 
the ranks of calendars by constant pistol 
shots, but as nothing hits you there appears 
to be no occasion for alarm. In fact, there 
are no pistols. They are blisters, or air bub¬ 
bles, that are popping as the mass is squeezed 
by the inexorable rolls of steel. With these 
volleys added to the rumble and jangle of the 
machines you can hardly hear the gum drop. 

By this time the 

WHAT THEY DO rubber has become 
WITH RUBBER. more tractable, and be¬ 
gins to look like rub¬ 
ber as we know it. The next thing is to put 
the big sheets through the soie calenders, 
whence it passes to the cutters at the benches 
behind. With a soie shaped piece of metal 
they cut out the soles, leaving the strips be¬ 
tween to be returned and worked over. The 
thinner sheets from which the uppers are cut 
pass over a calender that not only rolls them 
but stamps upon them the outline of the 
pieces. The men who receive these sheets, 
after boys have cut them into suitabie lengths 
in the room overhead, to w'hich they pass on 
an endless belt—the sheets, not the boys— 
have to use great precision in the cutting, yet 
with practice they make a pretty fair thing 
of It. One eiderly man says that he has cut 
as many 700 uppers in ten hours, though his 
usual stint is GOO, and this is worth to him 
about ?2 a day. 

There are other machines that apply gum to 
sheeting and rubber to felt; punches for heels 
and "rag” soles; compounders for the cheaper 
mixtures used for inside soles and the like, 
in which scraps of feit, rag rubber and so on 
appear; dryers, over which cloth is run to 
make the rubber stick; drums, 12 feet in 
diameter, on which the finished stock is reeled 
off; bake ovens for heels, in which the rub¬ 
ber is pressed and pared into the shape we 
see and walk on, and there is a large room 
occupied in good part by frames containing 
the sheets that are passed up by the endless 
belt. Each sheet, about the size of a blanket 
for a cot, is laid on canvas stretched over a 
simple oblong frame, so that it shall 
touch no other rubber and adhere to it. The 


boys who separate the sheets have to be spry, 
for the machinery would work faster than 
they do, otherwise, and there would be rub¬ 
ber all over the floor. 

. The material is 

MEN AND WOMEN now in form to be 
SEPARATED. put together, and 

it passes to an im¬ 
mense apartment, about 600 feet long, in 
which are the men and women who make 
the shoes. There is no partition, but it has 
been found best to keep the men and girls 
apart, for the girls will use tobacco and the 
men will flirt—no, it is the other way, of 
course, and both of them will talk. Not but 
that they can talk any way, if they prefer, 
because they are all on piece work and it is 
th^ir own lookout whether they will earn a 
quarter of a dollar a day or a couple of dol¬ 
lars. Evidently, however, they prefer to earn 
all they can. They are all intent upon their 
work. The ciatter of the hammers and Toil¬ 
ers used in fitting the fabric to the lasts is 
incessant and not one in the company of hun¬ 
dreds appears to have any thought e.xcept of 
the matters on his bench'before him. Every 
operative is known by number in the factory, 
not by name, and the pieces he is to use are 
cut out and placed for him in one of a series 
of wire cages known as the post ofuce. He 
examines a list as he goes to it in the morn¬ 
ing, and finds himself billed, say, for certain 
pairs of a certain size. Thus, under head of 
"Men’s Sandal Plain Toe Milan,” No. 44C finds 
himself provided with materials for making 
up twenty-five pairs of sixes and five pairs of 
tens; while No. 227 is to make thirty pairs of 
fives and four pairs of eights. A complete 
rubber shoe comprises nine pieces: The in¬ 
sole, lining, strip, junior, heel piece, filling 


sole, toe piece, upper and outside. For mak¬ 
ing a pair of such shoes of a certain small, 
cheap grade, the operative receives 2% cents, 
and 7 cents for the highest. Arctics require 
more work and are worth 12 cents a pair to 
the maker. The maker’s number is stamped 
on, so that he can be spotted if an imperfect 
shoe is returned. 

A matronly looking boss of the woman’s 
department beckons a rosy blonde and asks 
her to make a shoe while you wait. The 
pieces are slipped upon the wooden last, ac¬ 
curately cemented together, trimmed by scis¬ 


sors, rolled and tapped, and the shoe is ready 
to be pulled off in about ten minutes. “You 
see, she’s a little nervous at having men look¬ 
ing at her,” the boss explains. "If you hadn’t 
been here she would have finished that shoe 
in five minutes.” On the men’s side a curly 
headed Celt is called up and provided with 
materials for an Arctic overshoe. He is not 
nervous. He slams into his work and the 
shoe is finished, except the buckle, which 
must be sewed on, and in spite of the little 
wait that is necessary while the sole cement 
is setting, in eight minutes. 

Now to the varnish room, strong with the 
fumes of naphtha. Hardly necessary to say, 
“No smoking.” Here the men whose duty 
it is to dip the finished rubbers into the var¬ 
nish have acquired a nicety of handling equal 
to that of the man who cuts out the uppers, 
for they do not let the varnish run down on 
the inside of the shoe. After dipping, the 
shoes are put upon racks and run into tin 
ovens for baking or vulcanizing at a temper¬ 
ature of 360 degrees for six or seven hours. 
Were it not lor the vulcanizing the rubber 
would absorb come moisture, and would freeze 
like mud in cold weather. After the opening 
of the oven doors you notice that sulphur has 
crusted the lintels and casements. 

There is no more to do than to sew on 
buckles and buttons, string the pairs to¬ 
gether fob shipment and send them off to the 
packing rooms. The boxes are made from 
shocks on the premises, nailed together by a 
machine in a few seconds, the label printed 
on the cover by a regular printing press. 
Think of feeding pine slabs into a Gordon 
press! After packing the boxes are whirl¬ 
ed off to the big caverns where they are ad¬ 
dressed to Boston, New Orleans, Tokio, Bahia, 


St. Petersburg, Melbourne and Manila, and 
slid into cars, checked and sealed by the 
railroad company’s agents and started on 
their travels. Except the two 750 horse power 
engines, the battery of ten boilers that con¬ 
sumes thirteen tons of coal a day and the elec¬ 
tric light plant, we have seen the principal 
matters of mechanical interest. In the Mill¬ 
ville factory there is, in addition to what one 
sees at Woonsocket, a felting works and a re¬ 
claiming mill, in which old boots and over¬ 
shoes are reduced to merchantable commodi¬ 
ties again. It is said by scoflfers that there 



AN OLD COTTON MILL OP WOONSOCKET, R. I, 






















































6 


THE RUBBER TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


Is no rubber in rubber any more; that the 
material is tar and glue and ashes and other 
compounds, but they certainly use some rub¬ 
ber in Woonsocket, and the boys of the me¬ 
tropolis do not yell "rubberneck” at strang¬ 
ers who are gaping about at the imposing ar¬ 
chitecture, for it sounds too much like shop. 
I annn work in a rubber 

LAoUn factory does not require 

such mental brilliancy 
on the part of its oper¬ 
atives as you need to be a successful lawyer, 
nor the training and experience needed by a 
machinist or a carpenter. There is nothing 
in any department of the work that cannot 
be learned by a usual young man or woman 
In a month, though rapidity and earning pow- 


CONDITIONS. 


The Irish, for example, despite their aggres¬ 
sive tendencies, have shown a considerable 
aptitude for confederation m the departments 
of labor and politics, while the Germans have 
been fairly strong in labor unions and 
Slavs have tried to right their alleged wrongs 
by wrongs ten times as bad. Here in Woon¬ 
socket one finds a curious state of things, 
as far as Its population goes. In what used 
to be a Puritan town the Americans have 
gone to the wall and the Prench-Canadian 
dominates. In a populace of 26,000 these Ka- 
nucks number 15,000, while the Irish contrib¬ 
ute 5,000, and among the 6,000 remaining 
are Swedes, Poles, Germans and Italians. In 
Blackstone, half an hour’s walk away, the 
French are in a minority and the ruling pop- 



A STREET IN OUTSKIRTS OF WOONSOCKET. 


Every House Occupied by Rubber Workers. 


er comes with practice. Much of factory 
work in these times is merely attending ma¬ 
chines, anyhow. Machinery does a lot of 
thinking for folks. This fact considered, the 
wages in the rubber works are fair, as fac¬ 
tory wages go. They are better than those 
of the cotton spinners; hence, the company 
has the pick and has engaged rather a bet¬ 
ter class of operatives, and is not troubled by 
complaints and dissensions. There has been 
no labor disturbance in the rubber works in 
fifteen years, and strikes are never under¬ 
taken. Trades unionism has declined, al¬ 
though the Knights of Labor were strong in 
numbers and influence when they were organ¬ 
ized in the city. Unionism, too, has died to 
nothing, although an attempt is being made, 
with indifferent success, to organize the work, 
ers in the cotton mills. The last disturbance 
in the rubber works was created by represen¬ 
tatives of outside unions and so far as known 
there is at present only a cordial feeling be¬ 
tween employers and employed. The men 
work ten hours a day, it is true, but there 
are factories that still run on eleven hour 
schedules, and while there is no half holi¬ 
day, it is said that in the rubber mills it 
would be difficult to have one for the reason 
that the work is planned ahead, the shoes to 
be pieced together on Saturday being pre¬ 
pared on Thursday and Friday, or even as 
far back as Wednesday, so that it would be 
needful to shorten the hours on some of 
those days to prevent the piling up of unused 
material on Saturday. 


The disposi- 

FRENCH-CANADIANS tlon and doings 

o f employers 
and .employed 
depend not alone on the nature of the work, 
and earnings, and place, but on nationality. 


PREDOMINATE. 


Illation is Irish. Of course, with its French 
arid Irish populace, Woonsocket is a Catholic 
town, yet it is a noteworthy fact that while 
the two French parochial schools instruct 
1,800 pupils, and the Irish school, one of the 
best built in the city, has over 500, the pub¬ 
lic schools continue to teach more than these 
combined, their attendance being about 3,000. 

THRIFT AND 
EDUCATION. 

school implies a small fee, or a slightly larger 
contribution toward church expenses, while 
the maintenance of the free schools means 
only taxation that falls most heavily on the 
mill owners and merchants. And it is shrewd¬ 
ly suspected that nationality, likewise, de¬ 
termines the success or otherwise of the la¬ 
bor organizations, for these canny descend¬ 
ants of the Gauls would not willingly give up 
of their hard earned wages to support walk¬ 
ing delegates and strike committees, or tor as¬ 
sessments for the maintenance of distant op¬ 
eratives who had thrown themselves out of 
work. As usual, it is the American who 
lives most fully up to his income, but also, 
as usual, he appreciates the advantages that 
are offered to him. He uses the public li¬ 
brary and reading room more than his asso¬ 
ciates from across the border, and lives bet¬ 
ter, while he can, demanding as good a house 
as he can rent and as good a table as he can 
set. He has ambitions for his children. What 
would you think if I told you that the sec¬ 
ond man in his class in Harvard is the son 
of one of these workers in the rubber fac¬ 
tory who makes from $1.75 to $2 a day? Yet 
that is the fact. 

The French run more to financial than to 
Intellectual or artistic Improvement, and stor- 


In these matters it is 
the thrift of the French 
that clearly shows. Ed¬ 
ucation in a parochial 


lea are told of their saving powers that tax 
credulity. Only the Italians can give them 
points. It is said by older residents of the 
city, however, that they have become in good 
part Americanized during their stay with 
us, and that they dress better, live in bet¬ 
ter houses, eat better food and are more hos¬ 
pitable to soap and schools than when they 
arrived. Certainly, the young men and wo¬ 
men one meets about town are not an ill 
appearing lot, and many of them would pass 
for Americans if one did not hear them talk¬ 
ing their patois. They do not seem to care 
for their advantages in politics as the Irish 
do, although they once elected one of their 
number, Mr. Pothier, mayor of the city and 
afterward helped to make him lieutenant gov¬ 
ernor of the state. He is to represent his 
state at the forthcoming Paris Exhibition. 
The French manage to get a trifle ahead and 
then begin to speculate. How they do it on 
such margins as men must, who support fam¬ 
ilies on $6 to $10 a week (which they earn In 
the cotton mills) is to Americans an unfath¬ 
omable mystery, but by living hard, doing 
their own housework, not following the fash¬ 
ions too closely and allowing shows to come to 
town and exhibit to other people, they put 
aside a dollar and sometimes two dollars a 
week, while if they are unmarried they can 
save half of their earnings. People who do 
this seldom complain of hard times, although 
the times they live in would be thought hard 
enough for most. One factory hand has re¬ 
cently come into possession of two stores and 
is rated at $30,000. Several others own houses 
that they rent, and altogether a thousand of 
the factory hands in Woonsocket own their 
houses, albeit some are still under a mort¬ 
gage. 

The officers of the rubber 
SAVINGS OF company encourage the sav- 
WORKMEN money and the buying 

of property among their 
people. They realize that a man is a better 
citizen when he has a personal interest in 
the well being of his town, and that he will 
work more steadily when he has a mortgage 
to pay than when he is merely living from 
hand to mouth and has no responsibilities. 
There is a building and loan association that 
has done good work, and the banks show a 
surprising wealth. No failures have occurred 
in the city in twenty-five years and these 
banks are reckoned as among the soundest in 
the United States. They hold $10,000,000 in 
savings, one bank alone showing $5,000,000 
in deposits. This is the more surprising 
when it is considered that the city itself has 
few rich men, the owners of the mills elect¬ 
ing to live In Providence and other nearby 
cities, where the population is more American 
and the society more congenial. Of the 10.- 
000 depositors In these banks practically all 
are people who work. At the rubber factory 
it is reported that the French make satis¬ 
factory employes, the Poles fair, likewise, if 
not assembled together in great numbers, and 
the Swedes faithful and excellent. The 
Swedes appear to be mostly from the farfns 
on the other side of the sea and they do not 
endure the confinement of the factory as men 
of other nationalities will do. Most of them 
sicken of consumption and die in a few years. 
In fact, consumption is the chief cause of 
death in all the factory towns—and in most 
of the others, if it comes to that. 

In respect of morality, the 
DRINK THE workers are average people. 
CHIEF VICE greatest of 

their troubles. It would ap¬ 
pear, from the number of times it has led to 
their arrest, and one of the department bosses 
in the Alice mill says that about 6 per cent, 
of the employes in his room arrive on Mon- 




















7 


THE RUBBER TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


day morning “dopy” from the effect of Sun¬ 
day sprees. For that reason, he says, women 
make the better employes in certain branches 
of manufacturing. So far as the addiction of 
women to conversation is concerned, he does 
not believe they are more fluent than the 
men. There are people in the mill, says he, 
who so rejoice in the sound of their own 
speech that they would stay there all night and 
talk themselves to sleep, it they were not put 
out at 6 o’clock. As to the w'omen, there are I 
no statistics nor even reliable allegations I 
touching the matter of immorality, but it is I 
maintained that Woonsocket is at least the | 
equal, in social purity, of the mill cities in 
New Hampshire, Massachusetts and New 
York. The only street that has an ill repute, 
and is called by the police the Bowery, is 
one of the quietest, sleepiest, most innocen: 
and uninteresting thoroughfares, in its ap¬ 
pearance, to be found in the place. But some 
of the women there, they say, are not as good 
as they could be if they tried hard. 

An attempt was made not long ago to form 
a club among the young women of the mills 
for purposes of self and mutual Improvement. 
Perhaps its name acted as a hoodoo upon it, 
for they called It the Tekcosnoow Club 
(Woonsocket spelled backward) and it was 
not very long before it ran down in numbers. 
A while ago it had 130 members. Now it 
has about 30. Its members have drifted off 
into clubs of a more social nature, though 
there are not so many of these as one might 
suppose. When people have worked in a mill 
for ten hours they are not so eager to go out 
and show off their accomplishments as peo¬ 
ple are who work an hour. The Tekcosnoow 
Club had classes in dressmaking, cooking, 
embroidery and book binding, and it deserved 
to be kept up. Many of the mill girls show 
taste in dress, and on the street, before and 
after their day’s work, they present a good 
appearance. They do not wear that mark of 
extreme poverty that is to be seen on the 
faces and figures of the operatives in parts 
of England and Scotland. Possibly they are 
more kind-hearted than some of the showier 
people in the larger cities, for they do not 
wear so many dead birds on their hats. 


THE WORKING¬ 
MEN AND BOOKS. 


There is no doubt 
that many, especial¬ 
ly of the French, 
leave school too 
young, though the law specifies that they shall 
attend until the age of 12, and from that 
age to 15 they must have eighty days of school¬ 
ing in each year. In all of the mills there 
are boys so small that one can hardly believe 
them to have reached the 12 year limit, but, 
then, the French are undersized. There 
is an advanced night school which has an at¬ 
tendance of seventy-five or eighty, and half 
of the pupils are from the rubber works. 
Then there is a free library of 15,000 volumes 
of good books, which is well patronized, 
though the mill boys, as a rule, drop off when 
they reach the age of about 16 and begin to 
Add the streets attractive. One of the stead¬ 
iest patrons of the library is a lad of 15 from 
the rubber works, who returns at night In 
the same jaunty fashion in which he goes to 
work in the morning and who repairs to the 
library as soon as he has eaten his supper. 
He remains there completely absorbed in his 
reading until the lights are put out. One 


constant reader, who used to attract the at¬ 
tention of the librarian, was a worker from 
the rubber mills, a powerful fellow, with a 
hairy face, who looked like a gorilla. He 
wore no collar and was usually attired in a 
long ulster. Despite his uncouth appearance, 
his literary tastes were of the best. He 
would read nothing but the classics. One 
night he appeared in a state of intoxication 
and was ugly. His great strength made him 
dangerous and there was some difficulty in 
getting him to the police station. Next day 
he pleaded his own cause in court in so adept 
and practiced a manner that inquiries were 
made as to where he got his knowledge of 
law. It was then discovered that he had been 
a lawyer of some note, but had lost his prac¬ 
tice because of his love for the bottle. Either 
he left town or was ashamed of the scene he 
had made in the library, for he never ap¬ 
peared there again. 

cnoiAl lOllfl There is no caste among 
oUUIALiolVI the mill workers. Though 

GROWING hands in the rubber 

works are the elect among 
them, there.is no spoken envy. On the street 
one hears such phrases from people who pass 
as “Them’s the rubber fellers,” or “They’re 



Rubber Shoe Varnish Maker. 


the cotton men.” .\nd, as might be expected 
where trades unionism is weak, the socialist 
tendency is not marked, although observant 
people in the town say that it is growing. 
There was a Socialist ticket in the field last 
season, and out of 3,000 votes it received 200, 
which the heavy, serious person who was can¬ 
didate for Mayor regarded with satisfaction. 
It is not known exactly what the Socialists 
propose to do in the town, for it seems to 
be a well governed place, and, though not 
free from poverty, at least lacking in those 
exhibitions of it that may be found in some 
of the meaner industrial centers. According 
to the last annual report, there were 1,474 


donations to paupers by the authorities. These 
were nearly all foreigners, or of foreign 
parentage. Times have Improved since that 
report was written and the probability is that 
the distribution to the poor this year v/111 bo 
slight, because it will not be necessary. 

Woonsocket is a wooden city and real estate 
is not so high that extravagant rents are nec¬ 
essary. There are a few houses built to hold 
as many families as six, but usually the 
houses are double, and hundreds, if not thou¬ 
sands, of the employes live in cottages, two 
or two and a half stories high, with strips of 
grass in front and flowers and trees in the 
yards. Rents for the houses or half houses 
in which the operatives live run from $7 to $13 
a month. In Millville the rubber company 
owns twenty houses, each double, and, there¬ 
fore, accommodating forty families. The rent 
of a tenement is $2 a week. These houses 
were not built expressly for the employes, 
though most of them are occupied by their 
hands. It is of Interest to learn that there 
are men in the rubber works who, in addi¬ 
tion to paying for their own houses, have 
managed to buy stock in the company. 


lAADDnifCn Altogether, it cannot bo 
Imr nUVhU alleged that, so far as the 

CONDITIONS >'“bber trust is concerned. 

it has yet Imposed severi¬ 
ties of hours or reward on its employes. A 
man of middle age, who has been connected 
with one of the mills here for the longer part 
of his life—a man of more than local note, 
for he has devoted his nights to study, has 
taught himeelf Latin and Greek and taken 
his A. B. at Brown—says that Industrial con¬ 
ditions are far and away better than they used 
to be. “Why, I can remember,” said he, 
“when the best mechanics in the mills made 


$1.75 a day, instead of $4, as now, and when 
superintendents who drew out $1,000 a year 
were looked upon as wealthy men. Rents 
are higher to-day, but otherwise prices of 
living are much the same, and people can 
afford to buy new clothes oftener. Labor 
ought to be better contented than it is. If it 
would live to-day as it used to forty years 
ago, it could own bonds. A man with a wifa 
and child can live here on $1.50 a day. It 
he can get $100 or so ahead, that most tyran¬ 
nical of bosses, the labor union, will have no 
hold on him. Common laborers, when I was 


young, earned 75 cents a day, and we didn’t 
hear much talk of oppression and poverty. I 
remember one man, whose w'hole family 
worked in one of the mills here, and they 
earned $2.50 a day. They spent the whole of 
it, the man smoking two cent cigars and 
swelling around, no end. During one of the 
financial panics the mill shut down and ho 
was out of a job. He hadn’t saved a cent 
and his family kept on eating, just the same. 
The authorities went to him and offered to 
send him to the poor house, but he would not 
listen to that. Then they told him they 
would make him an allowance of |2.50 a week 
out of the poor fund and he accepted It. 
Well, sir, he lived on that $2.50 a week, just 
as easily as he had lived on the samo sum a 
day, and it is to his credit that he did not go 
Into debt.” 

Surely it will not be denied that times have 
improved since then. The question Is, will 
they improve as much more in the forty year# 
to come? 




































THE COKE TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


In that part of Pennsylvania that Is always 
torn up—the part that is black with dust and 
smoke and soot; the part that is traversed 
by quarter-mile trains loaded with black 
products of the mines; the part that is over¬ 
hung by a black sky and peopled by a race 
of gnomes with black hands and faces; the 
part that even in winter is pasty with black 
mud, where the brooks and livers are yel¬ 
low with sulphurous mine drainings—in that 
part the traveler at night catches a glimpse 
noi\ and again of long rows of fires glaring 


Semet-Solvay ovens at Dunbar. These ovens, 
which are retorts, make commercial use of 
the by-products —those chemicals from which 
we derive not only our prevalent and worth¬ 
less aniline dyes, but perfumes, medicines 
and flavoring extracts. There are in every 
ton of Connellsville coal 10,000 cubic feet 
of gas, of which 7,000 are used for roasting 
the coal into coke. The coke maker who uses 
the Semet-Solvay oven is said to make so 
good a profit on the by-product that he can 
afford to buy his coal, roast it and then give 


civilization. Is not found in the neighborhood 
of Connellsville. Exactly why they call it 
the Connellsville district does not appear, 
for it might as reasonably be called the 
Scottdale section, or the Latrobe, or the 
Unlontown, for there are no mines or ovens 
in Connellsville; but the town is a sort of 
commercial center for the region, and has 
an opera house, to the everlasting envy and 
regret of Scottdale, which has to ride five 
miles on a train that is not advertised as the 
swiftest or most frequent on earth, whenever 



CHARGING OVENS. 


and winking on the hillsides- If his view 
were only an eyeflash he might readily im¬ 
agine that a furious battle was in progress, 
and the flames and clouds of lighted smoke 
proceeded from batteries in action. There 
are rows sometimes half a mile in length, 
and sometimes rows one above the other. 
But there is no battle, except that of men 
against nature, for these fires and glowing 
smudges mark the coke tutens that within a 
relatively few years have developed one of 
the most important and best paying indus¬ 
tries of western Pennsylvania. 

Of all the great Industries of the land none 
Is more simple, in its present state of devel¬ 
opment. Will it be so long? Can it be pos¬ 
sible that the immense quantities of gas 
burned out of the coal are always to go to 
waste? Can it be possible that heat suffi¬ 
cient to send a daily fleet of steamships across 
the sea will always pass into the air, carry¬ 
ing with it merely the foulness of the burn¬ 
ing? Truly we are a wasteful people. We 
chop our forests, we dry up our rivers, we 
kill our birds, we throw away tons of food, 
we exhaust our seal and shad and salmon 
fisheries, then sigh and regret that such 
things must be, when they needn’t. There is 
a beginning, however, of a reform in respect 
of saving the by-products of gas, tar and 
ammonia, though not the heat, in a bank of 


away the coke, so great is his profit from the 
coal tars. 

niCPn\/CDV these ovens 

UloUUVtriT throughout the Con- 

BY SCIENTISTS. 

long and from one to five miles 
wide — are of the old beehive shape 
—a domed apartment let into a line of 
masonry that strikingly resembles a forti¬ 
fication. To make coke you must have ready 
access to the coal from which it is made, 
and this region is.therefore, a mining coun¬ 
try. In the winding, forlorn valleys through 
which turbid creeks wend and babble, the 
shaly hillsides show on eroded faces lines of 
dingy black, which are coal. Where this 
coal is pure enough to mine somebody mines 
it. More usually it is mixed with slate and 
mud, and is only fit to sell to the trusting 
and the distant. A ton of slate has been 
found by scientific experts to weigh just as 
much as a ton of coal. All of the coal is 
soft—the kind that converts Pittsburg and 
Cincinnati into towns of mystery, where the 
day on which a citizen can see for three 
whole blocks is marked with a black stone, 
there being no white ones. Anthracite coal, 
which has some of the good qualities of coke, 
and which according to law must be used 
in New York and some other centers of 


it requires to see “Uncle Tom's Cabin." 
And Connellsville is a good deal of a place 
when a “U. T. Show” reaches it. The Uncle 
Toms, the ferocious bloodhounds—three; 
count them—the two Markses, the 
jassax, the living creoles employed in 
the chorus, and the little Eva, spread 
themselves out very thin and long 
and march through the principal avenues of 
traffic, making a clamor with brass instru¬ 
ments, and the population turns out and ad¬ 
mires. At other times Connellsville is dis¬ 
posed to tranquillity. Its most picturesque 
characters are negroes, who work at the ovens 
and who live in the disorder to which they 
are accustomed in the South, and occasional 
Huns, Goths and vandals, who come in from 
the coking settlements to get drunk. Beside 
its opera house, where they pull the scenery 
in at an upper window and have vacant shops 
on the ground story, there is a hotel with sil¬ 
ver dollars in the office floor, after the fash¬ 
ion of a well known sajoon in New York, and 
this is a source of local pride. The Youghl- 
ogheny River runs past the town, but as this 
is too much of a mouthful, the taverns, shops 
and banks named after it are called The 
Yough. It sounds like rough, and seems to 
fit. Though there are brick streets in the 
town, nobody has been paid to clean them, 
and the result of this oversight, though com- 



































3 


THE COKE TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


fortlng to taxpayers. Is depressing to strang¬ 
ers, especially those who have squandered 
nickels to have their shoes blacked. There is 
a good looking school building, with a Will- 
latn Penn on the roof, gazing off toward the 
coke ovens, and there are newspapers and 
banks and a police force of three. 

Mines and furnaces and ovens are found all 
through the hard looking country roundabout 
this town, in Davidson, Bradford, Summit 
Valley, Everson, Stonerville, Mount Pleasant, 
Calumet, Mammoth, Llppincott, Terminus, 
Tarr’s, Hickman, Trotter, Stambaugh, Mon¬ 
arch, Leisenring and dozens of other places, 
varying in size and pretension from towns to 
squalid hamlets of half a dozen houses. Al¬ 
ways there is a smoke hanging over the land, 
always at night the eyes of the ovens wink 
and glare, always from the trunnels at their 
tops the lighted gas is pouring, and in the 
larger towns there are the roar and sob of 
machinery blowing blasts through furnaces 
for melting iron or rolling steel, and every¬ 
where the scream of the locomotive is heard 
and the long rumble of laden freights. The 
population is not dense at any point, but the 
appearance of activity, due to the coking in¬ 
dustries, might easily lead one to suppose 
the contrary. The farmers of the region do 
not exhibit much progress or prosperity, and 
many of the bare, bleak hills, suggesting in 
their outline as in their environment, the 
edge of the Yorkshire moors, have not felt 
the plow. 

The prevail 1 n g 

COMPANY HOUSEShouse in the vil- 


CHEAP, BUT GOOD. Sovrs^t Z 

company house, erected for the operatives, I 
and although it is cheap and its inhabitants ; 
take no pride in it, and do not know the 
meaning of the words pride, or neatness, or 
order, they are fairly weather proof and are 
really a better class of residences than one 
finds, say, in southern Chicago, where specu- I 
lative builders have put up thousands of one j 
story and attic houses, painted or faded, 1 
yellow and gray, erected in long, featureless j 
rows, and sometimes perched on brick stilts | 
to lift them out of the malaria. The cost i 
of such houses can hardly exceed $400. 
Those in the, coke country might average 
double that. They are almost invariably 
painted a dull red, which grows duller after 
they have stood in the smoke for a few years. 
Although some of them are built on streets, 
in other cases no attempt has been made to 
grade or level the earth between them and 
they face one another across strips of broken 
ground, one side of the lane being six or sev¬ 
en feet higher than the other, and nothing in 
the way of a walk for muddy weather. There 
is usually no cellar, but often a cave or 
earth house for meat in the yard. The bosses 
live in houses of a similar character, two 
story, painted red, but generally their houses 
are well kept and there are flowers and lawns 
about them and evidences of soap. In the 


larger places there are tokens of the intel¬ 
ligence and taste to be looked for in every 
American town or village. You shall find 
well built homes of stone and brick and 
wood, with conservatories and pretty lawns. 


with plate glass windows, with pictures on 
the walls and books on the shelves, and well 
dressed, well bred people living there. But 
no such houses are occupied by the coke burn¬ 
ers. And it may be said right now, that few 
of the coke burners would live in such houses 
if they could. Electric lighting has been in¬ 
troduced into places like Connellsvilie and 
Scottdale, as well as gas, and the trolley has 
made its appearance; but the free library and 
reading room, the park and public play¬ 
ground are yet awaited. There are some' 


churches that cost a good many dollars, the 
Catholic church being most conspicuous and 
prosperous. Most of the workers in the ovens 
are of the Catholic faith. Good reports come 
from the schools, both public and parochial, 
the indications being that the new comers 
from southern and eastern Europe are appre¬ 
ciative of our advantages for their children, 
if not for themselves. 

What is coke and what is It made for? It is 
coal with its sulphur and volatile matters 
burned out of it by a slow fire. It is almost 
a charcoal, and the process of making it is 
not dissimilar to that of making charcoal. 
It is a carbon, hard, porous, glistening, and 


changed during the roasting process from 
1 jse lumps to a fairly compact and homogeYi- 
eous mass. Its use at present is principally 
for the melting of ores and reduction of met¬ 
al. It is of special value in the rolling mills 
and pig iron furnaces since it does not carry 
the objectionable elements of sulphur and 
phosphorus to'the iron and it also bears a 
heavier burden than coal. Soft coal will crum¬ 
ble down under a load of iron in a furnace, 
whereas coke being tough will not break down 
and the cells pervading the coke are another 


advantage In the blast furnace in that they 
allow heat to penetrate the mass more easily. 

H f\nnr\ There is no reason 

COKE A GOOD why it should not ne 

DOMESTIC FUEL“""f f 

fuel, for it has the 
advantages of making a hot fire, and it has 
lost more or less of the ill smelling and dan¬ 
gerous gas which mes out into the room 
when the dampers of a stove or range are 
closed. The Connellsvilie coke is regarded 
as the best in America, and the equal of any. 
It is 89 per cent, carbon, contains little sul¬ 
phur and a mere trace of phosphorus, does 
not make a smoke, and is of even quality. 
Soft coal is an im- ossibllity i"- a well regu¬ 
lated city, but soft coal that has been 
coked is permissible, and on many accounts 
desirable. For manufacturing purposes ft is 
cl' aed that the heating power of coke is as 
11 to 9 in comparison with . iracite coal. 
There is but little ash and dirt and dust. 
Fires are made more quickly with it than 
with coal. 

The Connellsvilie seam that supplies the 
material for coke is about 9 feet thick, on an 
average. Ordinarily it has but little dip, the 
mine.- striking in on a level and maintain- 
in~ it until they have reached the end of the 
bed. Thousands of men are employed as 
miners alone, whereas twenty-five years ago 
all this region was undeveloped. In 1850 
t ere were but four coke ovens in all the 
United States. In 1860 there were twenty- 
one. . the next ten years only four were 
added. In 1880 there were 7,211 ovens and 
this number was more than doubled by 
1890. In 1897, when the last report was 
made, there were over 18,600 ovens in op¬ 
eration, which put out about 7,000,000 tons 


a year at an average price of $1.65 a ton, or 
more tha i $11,000,000 in gross revenue. The 
ovens at present number fully 20,000 and are' 
still increasing. At least 75 per cent, of all 
the coke made in the United States comes 
from the Connellsvilie district, and as a re¬ 
sult of that development, associated indus¬ 
tries In the black country have been greatly 
stimulate the liig iron industry especially 
owing its increase to the nearby and reliable 
supply of fuel. 

The miner usually loads eight tons of coal 
in his nine hour day, and the mines on an 
average are less unpleasant places to work 
in than r ^me of the deeper pits in the north 
of the state. Fire damp is Infrequent, so the 
men usually go about their work with lamps 


in their hats that show the naked flame. 
■Ventilation is managed by fans, and com¬ 
pressed air or steam are used for pumping, 
although at best a coal mine is a damp, and 
to a stranger a depressing place. There is 
nothing like getting used to a thing, how¬ 
ever, and some of these men say they would 
as lief mine coal as chop trees. They com¬ 
monly earn $2.30 a day, the track layers, 
horseback men and drivers earning about the 
same, and laborers, $1.35. The work does 
not appear to affect the health of the men. 
They are generally robust and can get up an 
appetite without cocktails. Those going into 
the mines at first and picking away for 
dreary hours in the black tunnels by the dim 
light of the lamps in their hats, finding no 
excitement except in the firing of small 
blasts by which portions of the seam are 
broken out, sometimes feel a sense of irri¬ 
tation such as may come to anyone who is 
shut in. and some of these men are two 
miles from daylight, and in the case of a 
shaft mine where the bed lies parallel with 
a surface bed, may be a thousand feet under 
the earth. 

The tunnels have railroads running through 
them, and the little cars, loaded in the 
rooms are pulled out in some cases by 
mules, in some cases by hoists and in other 
instances by steel ropes hauled by engines 
near the pit mouths. There are pumps in 
operation in the Mepths, also keeping t’ 
mines dry. .'i.nd where steam traction is 
not in use the mules usad in hauling coal 
from the rooms to the shaft or the main 
trunnel, are stabled far under the earth and 
do not see the sun for weeks at a time. 


WORKING IN 


■Vi’orking hours in the 
darkness are about 

THE DARKNESS. 

the light, and at night 
the only men left in some of the labyrinths 
below ground are those employed at the 
pumps. The rooms are the cubic excava¬ 
tions made in the' coal at right angles to 
the tunnel and are generally four yards 
square, with pillars between, uine yards in 
diameter, to siipport the roof. In time the 
rooms become tunnels themselves and the 
underworld is, therefore, pierced in all di¬ 
rections with roads and tunnels in which it 
would be ah easy matter for a newcomer to 
lose himself. Ninety per cent, of the coal 
is taken out before the roof becomes danger¬ 
ous. Water is constantly percolating through 
the overlying slate, but in the drift mines, 
which one enters at a level the water finds 
its own way out. In the shaft and slope 
mines it has to be pumped. 

Having taken out the eoal in buggies, as the 
cars are called, it is dumped at the tipple, 
from the tipple it goes to the larry, and from 
the larry to the oven. It is, therefore, neces¬ 
sary to add tPut a tipple is an ungainly ag¬ 
gregation of t. mhers which di-livers coal, at 
the pul! of a chain, to the larry, and that a 
larry is a car with a bottom deepening to a 
point, like a garbage scow, tnd that through 
this point the coal runs into the trunnel of 
the oven, the trunnel being the hole at the 
top. The ovens aie chamber; of dome form in 
the stone and brick embankment and the top 
of this embankment is level, w;ih a railroad 
running over it. The larries are pulied and 
pushed by little locomotives in some and 
hauled by the ever patient mule in others, this 
sure footed animal trotting by the blazing 
trunnels of the ovens without the slightest 


discomposure. 

When an oven has received its charge and 
the coal has been leveled eff the door is 
closed with firebrick and clay, except for a 
crack at the top, which supplies the air 


















10 


TIIT'^ rOKK TIM'S'I' AXD ITP EMPLOYES. 


needed for luiubustion. Were ihis opening at 
the bottom of the door the coal would simply 
burn ui). .As it is at the top It gives just 
air enough to encourage a slow smoldering 
and the gas and sulphur burn off, leaving the 
carbon coked. Each oven is made of fire¬ 
brick and Is 12 feet in diameter on the floor 
and 7 feet high. With ordinary use aud oc¬ 
casional repairs it will last ten years. It 
takes 3,000 firebrick, beside linings, tile and 
stone to make one. The charge varies from 
4% to 3 tons of coal for each oven, and after 
the Ooth who has loaded it has gone home it 
remains for forty-eight hours or longer, the 
addition of lime .servi.-ig to bake the coke a 
little harder; lor the ccke of those ovens must 


coke after the coolin.g is a scraper or spatula 
with a steel handle twelve or fourteen feet 
long and it takes some muscle to handle a 
thing like this. The same Instrument is used 
for leveling off the top of the coal after it has 
been put in. 

The coke having been drawn out Is loaded 
upon barrows with great forks, with which 
the Poles sometimes stab one another in their 
fights, and which must make the victim look 
like a collauder. These barrows carry it, .still 
warm, to the cars that enter the premises on 
a web of sidings and it is presently started 
on its travels. Then the drawer can go back 
to his home and turn In, as he will do with a 
part of his clothes on, if not all of them, and 



A COKE CRUSHER. 


be tough and firm for foundry or mill use. 
It is much harder than the gas house coke of 
other days. 

For a time nothing happens. But the walls 
of the oven were hot when the coal was put 
In and presently a little brown smoke begins 
to steal out through the trunnel. In half an 
hour, perhaps, there Is a flash and a little 
report; the gas has ignited. Now the mass 
begins to show blue flames dancing over the 
top and the baking has begun. The coal bakes 
downward, and so long as flame is seen 
pouring from the foot wide trunnel the product 
Is not ready for drawing. The men go to work 
at 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning, and begin 
by breaking down the doors of alternate ovens 
where the coal has been baking forty-eight 
hours or more. In the ovens between those 
to be drawn the fires are burning merrily and 
that hour in the morning are throwing a red 
glare on the clouds. The doors having been 
broken in a glowing mass is seen inside, and 
the drawer must now turn on the hose. There 
is a roar and hiss of steam while he is doing 
this. The longer the water is poured upon 
it the more readily the coke will split, and it 
splits downward from the dome in long sticks, 
but it must not be turned on so long as to 
destroy the heat of the oven walls, for that 
U to ignite the next load of coal. The im- 
Slemenl used to break up aud pull out the 


will pull up around his ears a coverlet as 
big as a mattress Were it not that their 
work keeps these people In the air, like sail¬ 
ors and lumbermen, they would die before the 
winter was over. In their overwarm, under- 
aired houses and their amazing beds. 

For these Poles and 

COKERS LIVE Huns live as they did on 

■ 11 /^ ^ATTI P the other side of the 

LlIVtUAI I LC. although you 

have heard that they are hardly used and un¬ 
derpaid end wretched, such is not the case, 
at least, when times are in enywise prosper¬ 
ous. At present they are making more than 
they ever did before in their lives. Yet thou¬ 
sands of them continue to live like cattle. It 
is the way in which th^y prefer to live. 
When the coking industry first amounted to 
anything the workers were nearly all Irish. 
They disappeared and Germans succeeded 
them. The Germans gave way before an ir¬ 
ruption of Swedes and now the ovens are in 
charge of Magyars and Slavs and Czechs. 
Forty per cent, of the coke workers are 
Slavs. 12 per cent. Poles, the rest Magyars, 
Greeks, Italians, negroes and more English 
and Welsh than you would expect to find. It 
is said that some of the English are just as 
dirty as the Polaks or Slovaks. Where a 
few Americans discover one another in a cok¬ 
ing settlement they signalize the find by or¬ 


ganizing a base ball club. Occasionally a 
Russian will go in for this sport, but the 
other folks stay by themselves. 

The usual Magyar is a tawny fellow with 
a black mustache, the angle of hi.s jaw sharp¬ 
ly marked, and when he travels he accom¬ 
panies himself with a bundle and umbrella. 
The Slavs have round, stolid faces with broad 
cheek bones, heavy mouths and fresh com¬ 
plexions. One sees surprisingly few old peo¬ 
ple among them. They all appear to be 35 
years of :ge. Among Americans these recent 
comers are considered stupid, but that is 
partly because they arc new to the country 
aud understand but little of our language. 
Their great fault is in having too many chris¬ 
tenings. At these chirstenlngs there is un¬ 
limited whisky at 50 cents a quart—a special 
brew for the coke district—and after the 
whisky there must eke be a dance. Now, a 
dance in a parlor with a greatest dimension 
of eighteen feet involves stepping on some¬ 
body’s corns, and when surcharged with 50 
cent liquor the coker is ready to take offense 
at anybody, even though within a quarter 
of an hour he has been seen embracing him 
and insisting on his drinking in his company. 
The result is that the christening breaks up In 
a drunken fight and knives and pistols ara 
flourished and several people are hurt. That 
more are not killed Is owing to bad marks¬ 
manship. which in turn is due to the fact that 
the shooter or stabber sees double. 

The greatest Insult that you can offer to 
a Hun or Slovak at one of his jamborees 
Is to refuse to drink with him. No Ken¬ 
tucky colonel could observe a more strict 
punctillio on this point. In Connellsvllle the 
arrests are 125 a month, which is not so very 
bad a showing for a place that alleges a popu¬ 
lation of 10,000, and nearly all the arrests 
are for drunkenness and fighting. While the 
chief of police was imparting this information 
a hilarious Hun w'as trying to persuade him 
to go into a saloon and have one with him. 
Possibly he succeeded before the afternoon 
was over. Most of the petty thievery is 
charged to the negroes of the district, and 
the wives of the black men are not In high 
repute among moral residents. The Slovak 
women, on the contrary, have a repute for 
uprightness and industry, and are with difll- 
eulty restrained from working in the mines 
and at the ovens with their husbands and 
brothers. In their own land these women 
would accompany their lords to their work 
and would also follow them to the saloon, 
hut in -America they mind the house and drink 
beer only at home. They are not to be found 
in the damp bars of Connellsville and Scott- 
dale lifting large glasses of beer—no Coney 
Island glasses would be tolerated there—or 
jabbering fiercely in strange tongues, or 
studying the misspelled signs In English 
written parallel with ohters in Polak or 
Magyar, setting forth the price of drinks. 
By the way, these bars close at 9:30. 

HUNS ECONOMICAL Btinct of thrift 
IN DRINKING. 

people possess 
to a large degree they buy beer, usually, by 
the keg, and .drink it at home; but 
with the instinct of thirst which they 
have in equal degree they drink all the 
more because it is handy to their elbows. 
The men scrupulously return the empty kegs, 
because they get a dollar when they do so, 
and the women receive a nickel bonus for 
seeing that the kegs are in clean condition. 
But, from the American standpoint. It Is a 
hard, poor life they lead. They take no 
amusements, except dancing and fighting at 
their christenings; plays and concerts are 
unknown to them; they have no games OK 







































































THE COKE TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


11 


picnics. The butcher saves for them the 
meat that has begun to decay and the thin, 
hard, fat, gristly and otherwise worthless 
strips and bits and leavings. The grocer 
sets aside for them the faded cabbages and 
frost bitten onions and the year before last’s 
potatoes and the canned stuff that has >tood 
for two or three years In tin. They succeed 
In this region because Americans, Irish, Ger¬ 
mans and Swedes cannot compete with them 
in cheap living. 

Still, from their own way of looking at It, 
they do not live hard. On their own farms 
In Europe they live on soup and bread, and 
they do the same here, with bits of meat 
added. Indeed, they sometimes became ambi¬ 
tious to live like Americans. A grocer In 
Scottdale succeeded In selling a pound of but¬ 
ter in a settlement of Polaks about a year 
ago, the first they were known to have 
bought. Since then several of the colony 
have bought butter and have become such epi¬ 
cures that they have even bought a couple of 
pounds of cheese. With light, good bread, 
made by their wives, in large loaves, and po¬ 
tatoes, side meat, beer and pollnsky, or bad 
whisky, they think they have all that Is due 
to them, and ask nothing better. 

Tn I FARM "^hese simple, dull, 

lU L-UHniH unclean, usual Eu- 

AMERICAN WAYS. ropean peasants, 

who are religious, 
hospitable among themselves, loyal to their 
kin, strong-backed, big-flsted, had a fight to 
get into the Connellsvllle country, but they 
are firmly lodged there now and some of their 
ancient enemies have learned to more than 
tolerate them. “I like these divvules,” was 
the opinion of one of the Irish bosses. It took 
them some time to fall Into American ways, 
but their aggressions against order were com¬ 
monly the result of ignorance. Ten years 
ago, when they went into the towns, they in¬ 
sisted upon using the public streets as la¬ 
trines. When an officer made an arrest a 
whole crowd would engage with him, biting, 
pulling, kicking and choking, or hugging like 
bears and trying to throw him. A policeman 
said: “Yet in all these musses I never was 
struck by one of them. They will average as 
strong as me, or stronger, but they had never 
learned to use their fists. A good rap on the 
sconce would bring them to their senses, and 
they make very little trouble for us now." 

There are in the United States half a mill¬ 
ion Slovaks and a hundred thousand Mag¬ 
yars, mostly in the coking and mining dis¬ 
tricts. They come clear from Budapest to 
Connellsvllle for $50—think of ft—on cars 
little better than our cattle cars and in the 
steerage of the cheapest lines. At first the 
men came here alone, but fearful rumors pen- 
e-:-ated Hungary and Russia that the bache¬ 
lors were falling victim t othe wiles of Ameri¬ 
can Indian maidens, and now the steamers 
bring large shipments of Slovak girls, who 
hurry to Connellsvllle with anxiety on their 
faces. They hire out as house servants until 
Ivan or Ladislas has made his pile of $1,500 
and decided to go home and live on it and be 
a grandee with one of them for a wife and a 
subsequent garretful of young ones to help 
run the farm. 

It Is rather surprising, in view of their sav¬ 
ing habits, that the towns have no savings 
banks. But that is because savings banks are 
too slow and small for them. Bless you, 
thesepeople deposit their superfluous riches in 
national banks. Thence they send them home 
to their brothers and cousins and agents to 
Invest in added acres and a tew more cows. 
The wages they receive in this country 
doubtless seem t* theai princely. As coke 


drawers they can earn as high as $3.50 a day, 
though the more usual figure is $2.25, the pay 
being 64 cents per hundred bushels. As 
miners with boy helpers they have in a few 
instances made as much as $110 a month, and 
In one month in 1899 a mine near Scottdale 
paid to its men an average of $75. Consider¬ 
ing how villainously they live, what small 
rents they pay, how all the members of a 
family work, and how they take boarders be¬ 
side, it Is not surprising that they do stunts 
with money that astonish an American. 


HOUSES LITTLE 
MORETHAN STIES. 


The rent of one of 
the bare little board 
houses with four 
rooms runs from 
$4.50 to $6 a month, according to size and lo¬ 
cation. Would you like to look into one? 
Very well. Say your prayers, hold your nose 
and come along. The heavy looking boy at 
the door holds a discussion with a baboon 
faced woman in the kitchen, and after the 
request has been duly considered the admis¬ 
sion is granted. We step into a kitchen not 
quite large enough to swing a cat in, but 
there Is no cat, because a cat might at some 
time cost a cent. It is grimy, greasy, lit¬ 
tered with rags, papers, old clothes, boxes 
and tin cans. Ascend one step and we find 
ourselves in the parlor, and really this is a 
surprise. The room is of the dimensions of an 
American bedroom, but it is papered and car¬ 
peted and there are cotton lace curtains at 
the two windows; there are a lounge, a fire¬ 
place, a tew cheap knickknacks on the mantel, 
and, especial pride, a new bureau, shiny with 
varnish and worth at the least calculation 
$8. The chairs are new and sound and there 
are halt a dozen pictures representing Cath¬ 
olic saints and Polish revolutionists and 
statesmen with jaw dislocating names. Now 
climb the dark, narrow winding stairs. 


air is rancid w'ith human exhalations, odors 
of onion soup and ancient meat. 

LIVINUi IS are too many 

DECIDEDLY CHEAP.^^r a'To^u"; 

room house, beside two married couples? 
What, then, will you say of a house that 
shelters tw-enty-flve? Nor is it the Huns and 
Polacks only who live o’ this fashion. A lit¬ 
tle girl whom I overtook walking on the 
railroad track on a drizzly night from the 
company store to her house, half a mile away, 
informed me in a brogue that there were 
three miners in her family and five children, 
and her ma took four boarders. Well, there 
are 20,000 cokers in the Connellsvllle district, 
and not houses for half of them—at least, not 
company houses; so what are you to do about 
it? Married men are preferred by the coke 
companies, because they are renters of com¬ 
pany houses and patrons of company stores, 
and they also provide for the bachelors by 
taking them as boarders. A bachelor may 
pay as high as $18 a month for board, and it 
is not unusual for the company to fix that by 
withholding that much of his pay and 
giving his landie-Zy an order on the com¬ 
pany store for $18. 


The commoner way Is for the boarders to 
buy their own meat, in which case they can 
hardly get It bad enough, and give the land¬ 
lady a certain sum a week for cooking it, to¬ 
gether with flour and coffee. Their beds cost 
little, it anything, for they are satlsfled with 
a shake-down on the floor, five in a room, and 
it is suspected that they never buy soap, be¬ 
cause they have never learned how to use it. 
There is also a prevalent belief, supported by 
olfactory evidence, that many of them have 
never taken a complete bath since they were 
born. They dress in shoddy and in their 



WORKMEN’S HOUSES. 


avoiding the touch of the broken plaster, 
filthy with the careless pawing of hands that 
never know soap, and we find ourselves in 
the principal bedroom, corresponding to the 
parlor. The head of the house lies asleep, 
rolled in one of those impossible coverlets 
that look as if they weighed half a ton, and 
snoring ln> resonant Polish. The baboon laced 
woman down stairs is his wife. The bed that 
touches his own, loot to toot, is occupied at 
night by two men boarders. In this little 
cubby hole, opening at the head of his bed, 
the boy we saw down stairs and his wife 
sleep. It is a veritable pig’s nest. On the 
lounge in the parlor another boarder hangs 
up for the night and a fourth sleeps on the 
floor. Up stairs also we find saints of the 
Roman Church, Polish soldiers and lawgivers 
and heaps of filthy rags and discarded 
clothes. The windows are all shut and the 


shopping they will go where they can get the 
greatest bulk for the least money. The men 
wear caps or soft hats, and in winter rubber 
boots with felt legs are popular. The women 
wear short skirts, tubby little jackets. Invari¬ 
ably have shawls on their heads and thick 
soled brogans on their feet. Their household 
belongings are so few that when they move 
they can often carry their dufiSe la their 
hands or on their backs. It they chose tie 
coke workers could live better than the aver¬ 
age of unskilled laborers, but they don’t 
choose. They are not without the amenities, 
however. Some of them can read, and In the 
little shops In Connellsvilldt where foreign 
money Is exchanged and steamer tickets sold, 
there is to be found a small selection of Hntl- 
garian papers and books, and the Magyars 
who run these shops are intelligent and court¬ 
eous. There are few clubs or societies, ex¬ 
cepting those connected with the church, but 
these are important. The First CathoUa 




























12 


THE COKE TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


Slovak Union, which pays by means of an as- 
6essment $5 a week in case of illness and $500 
at death, covers a wide territory and has no 
less than 12,000 members. The National 
Slovak Society, which insures its members for 
the same amount, has 10,000 members. There 
are 500 members of the Greek Catholic Union, 
which offers about the same insurance for an 
assessment of a dollar a month. Then, there 
Is a Lutheran charitable society with 200 
members and a charitable organization of 
Magyars with 100. 

Whatever may be said of these new comers, 
they seldom present themselves for public 
support as paupers. They have built large 
Catholic churches here and support them 
loyally. In the schools their children are re¬ 
ported as more tractable than American 
youngsters and some of them are bright as 
anybody’s children. That they want to learn 
Is proved by their willingness to tramp for 
miles in order to reach the schools. There 
are, for Instance, fifteen or twenty Polish chil¬ 
dren in the Village of Vanderbilt, who on 


sionarles to the Polacks till we have done a 
little missioning near home. 

The company store is an institution that be¬ 
comes a bigger and bigger bugaboo, the 
farther you get away from it. Around the 
coke region there is not much complaint. You 
have heard that there was, but when you 
reach Connellsville they will tell you that the 
stores are worst down in West Virginia, or 
in some remoter region. We hear heart 
breakbreaking tales of the white slaves, who 
pay most of their wages for rent, and what 
is left must be spent at the company stores. 
But you meet few broken hearts among the 
workers. It is the tradesfolks in the towns 
who are the unhappiest over the rivalry of the 


company store. 

Originally, this 

COMPANY STORES store was estab- 

SEEM POPULAR, Z '“’.Z', 

miners and others who lived at a distance 
from the settlements, but nobody denies that 
it is a source of income. The H. C. Frick 



IN THE NEGRO DISTRICT. 


every school day walk five and a half miles, 
frequently through snow and mud, to attend 
the parochial school at Scottdale. It is the 
ambition, also, of some of these people to 
become American citizens. Hundreds of them 
come to regard this as a better country than 
the old one, withdraw their bank deposits, buy 
real estate, put up houses, or live in an old 
street car till they can—provided, of course, 
that they are not renters from the coke com¬ 
panies—and before long are in a position to 
put on airs over the American. An American 
workman at Valley asked me: “What are 
these here savings banks? They’re a kind of 
monopoly, ain’t they?” Better not send mis- 


Company, which owns four-fifths of the Con¬ 
nellsville country, has twenty-eight' stores 
scattered through that region and buys its 
supplies by the car load. The average store 
of the Union Supply Company, as it is called, 
is the regulation country store, that keeps 
calicoes, chromos, medicines, fish hooks, dried 
apples, jack knives and candy, as well as 
green groceries and meat. It is even a little 
better stocked than the average country store, 
and is kept cleaner and has a larger force of 
clerks, and a more urbane and polite one, 
if truth must be told. In prices it varies 
little from those of the shops in near by 
towns, but as more than half the trade of 
some of the company stores comes from farm¬ 


ers and others not connected with the coking 
Industry, it would indicate that prices are a 
trifle lower or else quality a little better. 
They show enterprise, moreover, in sending 
their agents from house to house to take 
orders, and if there is any pressure upon 
the cokers to buy, it can hardly be severe. 
At any rate, it is claimed {kat there are men 
on the pay rolls who never spend a cent in 
the company stores, and they hold their places 
as securely as anybody. There is a hall in 
Scottdale where drummers for all sorts of 
concerns meet and exhibit their wares to the 
managers of the tw'enty-eight stores, who 
make their selections and stock up for half 
a year. It is seldom alleged In or around 
Connellsville that the men are overcharged 
for goods, but it is claimed that some men 
have as little as 28 cents coming to them 
on pay day, the balance having been traded 
out, which is easily possible, though with 
Huns it is difficult. An employe is some¬ 
times allowed to go in debt for his rent, but 
not very deep for groceries. At the time of 
the last strike in the foke district the Frick 
company supported the faithful men—called 
by others blacklegs—without cost, and in 
case of an accideni received at the ovens it 
sends the man to a hospital and pays his 
wages whale he is absent. It has, however, 
no charities, no schools, no restaurants, read¬ 
ing rooms, societies, playgrounds, amuse¬ 
ments, baths, laundries or other adventures 
in industrial reform. 

Few of the coke workers own their houses. 
Few building and loan associations will help 
them to do so. The associations persist in 
the faith that the company wants to keep 
a grip on the men and Intends to hold them 
as renters. A Polack who lived two miles 
from the ovens, where he and his boy were 
earning less than $1.50 a day, was saving 
money and paying $28.35 a month on a house, 
half of which he had already rented. An 
officer of one of the coke companies said to 
him: “John, two miles is a lorng w'ay to walk 
twice a day. You’d better rent one of our 
houses for $7 a month.’’ ’The man was 
frightened, believing that his place was in 
danger, but he had committed himself to the 
buying of the house, so he hunted around 
and got another job. He now earns $1.25 a 
day in his new place, but by dint of living 
on refuse and dressing like a tramp, and 
denying' himself all that an American thinks 
is worth living for, he has acquired abso¬ 
lute ownership of two lots and two houses 
beside. Where the ovens are near towns the 
condition of the workers is better than it 
is in the country, but it would appear as if 
the reason for this lay in the temptations 
offered to spend money and be human in the 
towns, and prevent the Slovaks and Huns 
from living in their chosen meanness. Sym¬ 
pathy is wasted on a man who enjoys squalor, 
and some of the coking districts are almost 
as squalid as the east side of New York. 
























i'l'.T’ST 


THE ELECTRIC TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


After the man who comes aboard the train 
to give chloroform to the passengers, because 
they are about to pass through Albany, has 
finished his work, you have a vague sense of 
hearing something or somebody say: “Schen¬ 
ectady the next stop,” and you begin to re¬ 
cover consciousness just as the engine slacks 
up at the station of that town, preparatory to 
running across the main street. Schenectady 
is cerebrated in two ways: tor being four¬ 
teen miles from Troy, according to the song, 
but the man who wrote It is a lyre, for It is 
twenty-one, and for having the works of the 
General Electric Company just a little south 
of its midst. It rests content with those two 
achievements, though if it liked it could brag 


Schenectady every winter who are not even 
known by name in Brooklyn, and Schenectady 
inflates itself accordingly. People who are 
accustomed to the gayetles of Paris and Vi¬ 
enna say that Schenectady reminds them of 
those towns a good deal—It is so different; 
but Schenectaddlers believe that these slights 
merely show how jealous of them Paris and 
Vienna are. 

Beside, it has Erie Canal, which by moon¬ 
light has been likened to Venice, and its mer¬ 
chant marine is really picturesque, especially 
when the hardy tars who live aboard during 
the winter appear on deck to look at the 
weather an^ pump bilge water out of the 
hold, or feed the cattle in the front parlor. 


around this year they can show him 28,000 
without rising from the table. Sanguine cit¬ 
izens pooh pooh at the conservative element 
and chide it for timidity and lack of initia¬ 
tive. “If we can’t show you 35,000 people in 
this town we’ll eat our hats,” they say. It is 
hoped that they will be able to save their 
headgear, for it is cool along the Mohawk in 
cold weather. 


But there Is no doubt 
that Schenectady has 
grown, and the prin¬ 
cipal reason for It Is 
the General Electric Company, that started a 
while ago as the Edison Company. Mr. Edl- 


WHY THE TOWN 
HAS GROWN. 



y . 

GENERAL ELECTRIC WORKS AND TENEMENTS. 


of its new armory, with a brick tower on the 
corner, and Union College. There is a little 
park where the unfailing stone soldier stands 
perched on a dornick, seeming to repent what 
he did in 1864, and there are more streets 
that seem like other streets than you can find 
in almost any other place of its size, though 
the old Dutch part of the city is delightful. 

There is neither splendor nor squalor, and 
although they do not have the Grau Opera 
Company and such things, much. It would as¬ 
tonish you to see the number of concert 
troupes and theatrical companies they do 
have, that are not to be seen anywhere else. 
There are three sheet poster celebrities in 


Mules have an awfully easy time on the canal 
after the navigation season has closed. 

Schenectady has a post office that is differ¬ 
ent in some respects from the one in New 
York, though you can find your way about 
in it easier. It is the custom of the natives 
to assemble there after the trains come in and 
get their mail, trying to beat each other up 
to the window, and if you mail a parcel the 
clerk will lick the stamps for you, taking all 
chances of government microbes. 

When they took the last , census Schenec¬ 
tady strained every nerve to touch the 20,000 
mark, but missed it by 84. Conservative resi¬ 
dents say that when th|^ census man comes 


son’s name was distributed so widely oy*" 
other enterprises that, just to be distin¬ 
guished, this company left oft his name, 
though he still holds stock. It is not merely 
a big thing for the town, but for the country, 
for there are few larger factories in the land, 
or in the world. It has three works in Amer¬ 
ica, and factories, likewise, in England, 
France and Auatrla. Read the addresses on 
the boxes in its yards, awaiting shipment on 
the cars that enter its premises on Us own 
track, and you see they are addressed to all 
parts of this country, to London, to Parts, to 
Yokohama—-wherever the people use trollejr 















































































































14 


THE ELECTRIC TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


cars, arc or Incandescent lamps, blowers, mo¬ 
tors or whatsoever. 

Henry George is held responsible for the 
presence of the great works. When he was a 
candidate for mayor of New York it was 
feared that serious labor troubles would re¬ 
sult, and some of the manufacturers began to 
pack up their traps and get out of the city. 
As It happened, he was not elected, and might 
not have caused a revolution had he been; 
but the Edison Company was frightened, and 
had begun to cast about for a new shop. It 
was then doing business in a side street in 
Manhattan. One day a clerk, in riding 
through Schenectady on a train, noticed a 
large space between the railroad tracks and 
the canal, containing a couple of old buildings 
that had been put up for factories, but never 
occupied. He reported at home on the desira¬ 
bility of the situation, and the place was 
bought at once. That was only thirteen years 
ago. 

Now, on that spot, which is 135 acres in ex¬ 
tent, or more than a quarter as large as Pros¬ 
pect Park, and three times as big as the 
sacred Common of Boston, there are more 
than ninety buildings and sheds, in which 
nearly 6,000 men and women are employed. 
In the three American shops of the company, 
which Include those of Lynn, Mass., and Har¬ 
rison, N. J., about 11,000 persons are em¬ 
ployed, and the weekly pay roll comes to 
$120,000. It would seem as if, to handle the 
funds of such an army, would Involve diffi¬ 
culties and complications, but the whole party 
o! 5,900 in the Schenectady works receives its 
envelopes in less than fifteen minutes on Fri¬ 
day evening It does take time to make up 
the rolls, however, and on Friday night the 
hands are paid for the preceding week. This 
is because the work is mostly done by the 
piece instead of by time, and varies every day. 

In respect of space 

LABOR’S OWN occupied, there are 

LITTLE EMPIRE. ^wX liT es¬ 
timated that, counting the three American 
factories, the floor space will amount to not 
less than 2,000,000 square feet. There is room in 
the Schenectady shops for a world fair, and 
the sides of the buildings would not bulge 
much. To be sure, they are not wholly pretty. 
Factories seldom are. They are of brick, 
■without statuary or fountains, a little garden 
at the main gate being the only effort at or¬ 
namentation. Indeed, it would not be easy 
to turn the place into a park, for in order to 
haul the heavy castings that are turned out 
by the works the grounds are cut Into streets, 
and these streets are traversed by freight 
trolley trucks. 

But although the shops are fitted with elec¬ 
tric roads and electric cranes and electric 
lights and electric ovens and other electric 
appliances, there is not so much of a display 
of electricity as you might suppose you were 
going to see. For the shops do not exist for 
the purpose of manufacturing electricity; only 
for making the machinery whereby electricity 
is generated. Still, the current is used as a 
power wherever It is practicable, and you are 
reminded of this fact by signs of “Danger; 
Keep Out.” by illustrated placards show¬ 
ing what will he done to you if you step on a 
live wire, or get your fingers full of sparks 
from monkeying with machinery that you 
mustn’t touch. 

In one department are three rotary con¬ 
verters of 600 horse power each, that change 
the alternating current which comes from Me- 
chanicsvllle, more than eighteen miles away, 
into a direct current for lighting and power. 
The total draught on the Hudson is 3,000 horse 
power. They will tell you how it is done, if 


you insist on knowing, but before trying to 
understand, take a post graduate course some¬ 
where and brush up on your Greek and math¬ 
ematics. When they say to you, “This 10,000 
volt 500 h. p. synchronous motor, driven by 
three-phase current, is a remarkable instance 
of the transmission of high potential from the 
armature of the generator at Mechanicsville 
to the armature of the motor without break,” 
you agree to it wisely, and resolve to think, 
some time. 

The General Electric works are various. 
They are a foundry, a pottery, a rubber works, 
a blacksmith’s shop, a railroad, a restaurant, 
a college, a machine shop, when it is not sev¬ 
eral of these at once. It has but one rival, 
the Westinghouse Company, namely, and it 
has patched a peace with that, for perpetual 
quarreling over rights and privileges was ex¬ 
pensive to both parties, and Mr. Westing- 
house gets some of his work done right here 
In the rival’s shops, while a relative of his 
peacefully manufactures mowing machines 
and other harmless implements at the very 
doors. 


.......n.- Hls Claimed that in 

WHERE BRAINS the quantity of me- 

ARE VALUABLE materials 

Hnc VHL.UHDl-1^. Schenec¬ 

tady uses more than any other factory in 
America. It eats up 3,000,000 pounds of steel 
and iron, and 2,000,000 pounds of copper a 
month, and about the same amount of sheet 
iron. As to the zinc, pig iron, clay, rubber, 
wire and composition, they have to be reck¬ 
oned in car loads. The delicacy of much 
of the work calls for the use of perfect ma¬ 
terials and intelligent handling, and there 
is much expense that is not incurred In other 
industries. Probably the principal outlay is 
in brains. This is work that cannot be in¬ 
trusted ti Thomas, Richard and Henry, for, 
if It were, fires and killings would be common 
in the towns where electric lights and motors 
are in use. The labor must be intelligent; 
hence, it must be attracted by a wage that is 
higher than could be earned In carrying a 
hod. As a result of supply and demand, the 
shops of the General Electric Company are 
occupied by a class of men who have probably 
no superiors in the mechanic industries of the 
land, and they give a color of thrift and so¬ 
briety to their city. In most big factories 
one finds common school graduates, and some 
high school graduates, with an occasional 
failure from a seininary* or technical school, 
but here not only are high school men usual, 
but there are scores of men from Yale„ Har¬ 
vard, Columbia and other universities, while 
the technical schools of the whole country 
and of other countries are represented. 


The average wage paid in the works is over 
$2 a day, and this average is considerably re¬ 
duced from what it might be by the em¬ 
ployment of girls in some of the easier or less 
skilled departments. ’There are expert ma¬ 
chinists, pattern makers, electricians, chem¬ 
ists and what not, who make as much in a 
year as a fair and perhaps good lawyer or 
physician, Twenty cents an hour Is the 
average time wage, but in this place, as in 
others, there is more-and more of a tendency 
toward the substitution of piece work for 
time, each man making what he can, and the 
hands being thus kept more strictly to their 


tasks. 

The first steps in the making of the product 
are to be seen In the foundry, an Immense 
establishment 740 feet long and of propor¬ 
tionate breadth, where, at the time of “pour¬ 
ing off,” 300 men can be seen through the 
dust and steam and smoke, vague and big, in 
the bursts of red light from the cupolas, and 


from the pots of melted iron. It is like 
some hall in the underworld, where gnomes 
and Nlebelungs toll at the metals they force 
from the primal rocks. The cupolas, or melt¬ 
ing furnaces, have several spouts apiece, in¬ 
stead of the customary one, and have capac¬ 
ities respectively of 7, 11 and 18 tons of iron 
an hour. As the metal is poured out, in a 
lava like stream, it is received into buckets 
of varying size, from a few pounds to several 
tons, Bud as it flows from the spouts the air 
about is filled with rocket like displays of 
sparks, the little spatters of hot iron blazing 
pyrotechnlcally on contact with the oxygen 
in the air. For small work hand ladles 
suffice to carry the metal, and it Is poured 
fiom them into the molds of sand, but for the 
heavier pices there are huge cranes trav¬ 
eling along under the roof—seven of them, 
operated from the central power house. The 
iron must be poured steadily into the hole 
in the sand that opens into the hollow formed 
by the wooden pattern, or there would be a 
spatter of liquid metal and the workmen 
would be badly burned—some of them fatally, 
no doubt. These things become matters of 
practice, and excite no more trepidation than 
the running of trains or trolley cars or the re¬ 
pair of electric light wires. And it is a 
curious fact that in spite of the heat and dust 
of foundries the workmen in them enjoy ro¬ 
bust health. There are some fine specimens 
of physical manhood in this department, and 
one sees them at an advantage when they are 
stripped half to nakedness for their work 
about the cupolas. The steam arising from 
the moistened sand of the molds, with their 
hollows faced with graphite, has an odor of 
fried potatoes—not vpry good potatoes, and 
not artistic frying, yet, still, potatoes. 


IN BATHING. 


In the foundry the 

THEY BELIEVE men have wire covered 

lockers for their clothes, 
in a clean, quiet room, 
with a stone floor, and there are troughs of 
water, with individual, nickel plated faucets, 
where each man may wash at the temperature 
that pleases him. Farthermore. there are 
shower baths, of which more and more of the 
men avail themselves. At first this innova¬ 
tion of baths was viewed askance, and there 
was a suspicion that people who would 
Indulge in such softening luxuries were a sort 
of dudes; but it is not so any more, and it is 
another odd fact that the cupola hands will 
strip off their sweaty duds and step directly 
under the chilling streams while they are 
crimsoned with heat, and never suffer from 
cold in consequence. 


One of the machine shops is 960 feet long 
and is traversed from end to end by the over¬ 
head cranes that lift, some of them, 50 tons 
and are guided by men in cages. Another 
shop where generators and motors are made 
has two of these cranes. There is yet an¬ 
other, with a floor space 650 by 165 feet, where 
800 hands are busy under 126 arc lamps— 
enough to light a small town. Here the ab¬ 
sence of countershafting Is noticed, the great 
planers, lathes, shaving and slotting machines 
and borers being driven by individual motors 
that can vary their rate of speed. Every ma¬ 
chine is thus enabled to yield its maximum of 
strength and output. Another peculiarity of 
this shop is an iron floor 125 feet long, laid in 
cement and provided with long slots for 
clamping the work into it, for such is the size 
of some of the pieces to be treated that the 
machine must be brought to the piece, not the 
piece to the machine. The cranes carry the 
lathes or borers to the huge bulk of Iron 
and it is steadied by the iron floor while the 
machine plays around it and bores or shaves 







15 


THE ELECTRIC TIULST AND ITS EMPLOYES^. 


The three big boring mills practically never 
shut down. From any one of the galleries 
we look Into this world of strange forms and 
busy action as into Nifelheim. The great 
generators from that height resemble forti- 
flcations or the turrets of warships, and would 
make a stout defense against older artillery. 
Eight of them are to be used by the Manhat¬ 
tan Railroad Company and they represent 5,000 
horse power each. 

Passing the brass foundry, where the sights 
and processes do not greatly differ from those 
in the iron foundry, we enter a shop in which 
700 tons of sheet iron are used every month 
for armatures. These pieces are punched out 
in big presses, of which there arc 30, and the 
largest registers 999,999 pieces, showing how 
many the operator has made and enabling the 
Clerk—each department has a clerical force 


taken out at the other end, on the conclusion 
of their ten hours of baking. 

WHERE BOYS 

HAVE A CHANCE. 

IS doing the workthatuntilafewyearsago was 
done by hand. There is much, however, that 
requires oversight, and each machine has its 
own form of winding. In the testing depart¬ 
ment, as in the department of electrical con¬ 
nections, the men have to be especially 
trained and the standard of intelligence is 
high. Commonly an untrained man enters 
one of the shops as a helper, and if he shows 
aptitude he is advanced until he becomes an 
expert. The old four year apprentice system 
is practically done away with, and it was an 
unjust system, because it kept a boy running 


can of our ways and are prepared to do for 
their people what such factories as those of 
the General Electric Company do tor this 
country, .^nd materials for trolley roads in 
Yokohama are now being made in Schenectady 
as well as for the roads in London and Paris, 
while the controllers for cars seen in one of 
the shops have a familiar appearance to a 
Brooklynite. 

Then there is a rubber factory where rub¬ 
ber, asbestos and other Components are blend¬ 
ed for insulation, and there is likewise a pot¬ 
tery in which porcelain pieces are molded and 
baked. The rubber mill makes caps for 
suspending trolley wires, rings for lamp fix¬ 
tures and pegs or socket handles for turning 
on the light: while the china works turn out 
switches and other pieces needed fei- pIpp- 
irical installations. In making the porcelain 



THE RUSH EOR HOME. 


of its own—to compute his ca.’nlngs and pay¬ 
ment. There is a strong, garlic-like odor in 
the japanning department of this shop, and it 
is in this department that a remarkable 
change has been wrought through the intro¬ 
duction of machinery. Formerly every one 
of the disks had to be japanned by hand. Af¬ 
ter they were coated they were hung in rows 
to dry and the process took forty-eight hours. 
Now it is all done in thirty seconds. The 
lacquer is applied to both sides with some¬ 
thing like printers’ rollers, the disks pass at 
once to an endless belt, which carries them 
between nozzles pouring out compressed air, 
and in their flight of twenty feet they are 
dry. The substitution of machinery for hand 
labor has been actively opposed at every 
stage, but when the results are so strikingly 
superior as they are in this case resistance is 
futile. The disks after this almost instant 
drying are put into iron boxes that roll on 
balls into annealing furnaces along an in¬ 
cline, the boxes on the track moving in, one 
or two at a time, as the finished products are 


errands during his first year and then paid 
him boy’s wages for man’s work in the last 
year. .\n employe of some of these shops 
may count on becoming a mechanic in two 
years if he has a liking for the work and 
tries to learn. Even country boys with little 
education • have become good mechanics— 
though never the best ones, the manager 
says. 

In such departments as those in which 
railroad motors are put together there is con¬ 
stant call not merely for skilled, but intelli¬ 
gent labor, and the company is always glad 
to secure a high school pupil. The various 
machines, after they are put up, are tested 
under conditions in which they are eventu¬ 
ally to operate, but they must also endure 
tests of greater severity, and if they fail in 
this way they are declared defective and 
thrown out. In the test department are sev¬ 
eral Englishmen, Germans, .\ustrians and 
two Japanese, all graduates of technical 
schools. The Japs will return to their own 
country after they hav^- learned what they 


great care is necessary, for the clay shrinks 
one-third in the firing, and it must be accu¬ 
rate in its measurement on completion to re¬ 
ceive the wires and brass punchlngs. The 
processes of washing, mixing and pressing the 
clay, drying it in cushion shaped masses on 
racks, regrinding, molding in presses, brush¬ 
ing to remove “fins,” baking, glazing and re¬ 
baking can be studied here as adequately as 
in the potteries of Trenton or Greenpolnt. 
The kilns in which the baking is done are two 
stories high. 

There is another building where work¬ 
men are drilling and polishing marble for 
switchboards; still others in which the 
porcelain and brass parts of installa¬ 
tions are put together; machine shops 
where automatic beings turn screws and cut 
them off while nobody is around; and in one 
long room 125 women are adjusting lamp keys 
and sockets, some of them chewing gum after 
the manner of the eternally feminine. In the 
gallery of one of the machine shops 180 girls 
are splitting mica for insulators. This mica 


























































10 


THE ELECTRIC TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


comes from Canada and India, and is divided 
into the thinnest possible sheets before past¬ 
ing upon strips. The quickness and deftness 
v/hich these well appearing young women ac¬ 
quire is wonderful. They will wrap a lamp and 
box it so quickly that your eye hardly follows 
the operation. “We couldn’t learn to do that 
in ten years,” said one of the officers of the 
company after watching the process for a few 
moments. When a girl enters the works she 
is commonly able to earn only 65 cents a day, 
but in a short time she more than doubles this, 
and she has not qute reached the limit when 
she attains to $1.50. 


In wandering about Schen- 

THE SEARCH ectady at night you may 

I ICUTC startled by the sudden 

LI unto. emergence of a church 

steeple or a factory chimney out of 
the prevailing darkness in a glare of white 
light and its sudden disappearance. It is a 


taining pictures of pieces of machinery that 
could not so well be taken in the dust and 
darkness and vibration and movement of the 
larger buildings. The machinery is put on a 
flat car, trundled directly into this building, 
its picture is taken, and it is wheeled away to 
be boxed up. Sunken tracks of the New York 
Central and Delaware and Hudson roads enter 
the premises so that freight may be put di¬ 
rectly into the cars without lowering them 
from the floor. 

There appears to be 

COOKING DONE a human interest in 
BY ELECTRICITY. places where folks 

eat, and the kitchen 
and restaurant which have been provided for 
such of the men as care to use them is a curi¬ 
osity. All the cooking is done by electricity, 
the odors of cooking are carried off through 
a metal hood and pipe by means of electrical 
fans, the tables for carving and counters for 



HOUSES OF GERMANS 


(TWO FLAT S IN EACH). 


searchlight, that is playing around the neigh- 
borhoood, directed from a platform on one of 
the highest roofs in the electrical works. All 
the search lights for the United States Navy 
are made here, as well as some tor other na¬ 
vies, and this is a branch of the business in 
which care is required, tor on ship board all de- 
vic53 tor controlling lights have to be confined 
in water tight boxes. There is at present a 
lieutenant of our Navy and one of the Russian 
navy residing near the works for the purpose 
of overseeing and testing the lights. A white 
target has been erected on a hillside 6,000 
yards away, and the lens and mirror must be 
so accurately adjusted that the target can be 
picked up at night when the light is aimed 
in conformity with certain usances. And 
the glass coverings in front must not 
be too loose nor too tight, for in the 

one case they would admit water, while 
In the other the heat generated by the 

arc light inside would break the casing; 
heiice the glass has to be put in somewhat 
loosely in strips. The beam of the searchlight 
has been seen, it is said, a hundred miles 
when thrown from high mountains, but it is 
more officiallv declared that the longest range 
thus far is from Milwaukee to Chicago, a dis¬ 
tance of eighty miles. Thirty-inch lights at 
sea have made signals that were road twenty 
miles away And not only are ships nowadays 
provided with electric lights, but with electric 
blowers, boat hoists, ammunition hoists, 
winches and the like, while the Kentucky 
and Kearsarge operate their turrets by elec¬ 
tricity. 

One of the buildings on the grounds here is 
a pheioeraph shop, with five operators and a 
ralU'oad. it was put up for the purpose of ob¬ 


serving are of soapstone. Three hundred men 
lunch here every day, and there are separate 
rooms for the young women stenographers 
and for the officials. A considerable variety 
of food is served here at little more than cost, 
some of it for less, both for breakfast, which 
is on from 7:30 to 9, and tor lunch, which is 
eaten between 12 and 12:30. This quick lunch 
might be considered as destructive to diges¬ 
tion, and foreigners will doubtless grieve over 
it, but it is the choice of the men themselves, 
as, by limiting the time for dinner to half an 
hour they leave the shops at 5:30, or, 
halt an hour ahead of their fellows in other 
factories. The bill of fare offers roast beef, 
steak pie, steak, chops, rice, cold meats, sand¬ 
wiches, beans, succotash, eggs, milk, coffee, 
cocoa, Vichy, ginger ale, sarsaparilla, birch 
beer, cakes, pies and puddings, the prices run¬ 
ning from 20 cents, which is charged tor a 
steak, to 5 cents, which is charged for vegeta¬ 
bles, drinks and desserts. 

Many of the men prefer domestic cooking, 
however, and go home for lunch. Stand at 
the gate when the noon whistle blows and 
you may see some exhibitions of pedestrian- 
ism that remind you of the walking matches 
in Madison Square Garden. Not only must 
the operative eat his dinner in that half 
hour, but he must walk to his home and 
back. Possibly the walk saves his life after 
the four minute meal. But many of the peo¬ 
ple have their dinners taken to them, and it 
is a curious, a.ssemblag3 that you find at the 
gates just before noon—women in shawls and 
hoods, children with red noses and mittens, 
some on bicycles, some dragging toy wagons, 
but all w'ith pails or baskets, usually baskets 
—and there is one impress wagon from a hotel 


with about forty meals In baskets, likewise. 
Three or four minutes before noon a signal 
is given and these messengers are permitted 
to enter the grounds. A charge of Oklahoma 
“sooners” is the only thing like it. They 
rush to the buildings in which their hus¬ 
bands, brothers, sons and fathers are em¬ 
ployed and presently those family necessities 
are discussing Irish stew and hot tea in the 
privacy of some secluded generator, or in the 
lee of a friendly lathe. 


Most of the em- 
NATIONALITY ployes in the electric 

DOESN’T COUNT. 

I V/V/UI 1 I. cans, but there is an 
Increasing number of Germans. Those Teutons 
who have found the place a good one, have 
sent home for their friends and there will be 
more of them here presently. They become 
thoroughly Americanized after a short time, 
however, and are painstaking and intelligent. 
This, alter all, is but a lair exchange for the 
material output, for 40 per cent, of all the 
machines and appliances made in these shops 
goes abroad, and this amount is increasing. 
So long as a man does hie work there is no 
more consideration of his nationality than 
there is of his religion or his domestic rela¬ 
tions, and, if he is a chemist, he can be put 
at once on such work ae the testing of mate¬ 
rial delivered on the trains, some of which is 
not unloaded until the samples have proved 
satisfactory. Two of the foremen in im¬ 
portant shops are Germans, and recently Poles 
have been employed in some of the yard work. 
They have been satisfactory in some respects, 
but are not of high Intelligence and are secre¬ 
tive and not over-honest. If one of them has 
stolen anything his companions will say 
nothing and know nothing. 

Most of the men are members of trades 
unipns, but, as most of them are also family 
men, they never undertake any measures 
that are likely to result in strikes or dis¬ 
charges or lock-outs. They do not control 
the works, which are “open shops.” The 
unions are potentials, rather than activities. 
There is a labor union hall down town, near 
the canal, w'here meetings are held every once 
in a while. It is the usual kind of place, 
with an odor of many pipes and cigars per¬ 
vading the air and grained into the plaster, a 
small stage with an attempt at scenery painted 
on the wall behind it and a plentiful bedew¬ 
ing of tobacco spit on the floor. The men one 
meets there in the evening are mechanics, 
and they appear ordinarily chatty, friendly, 
cheerful and well dressed. Watch chains of 
gold are not uncommon among them, and it 
is safe to say that many, if not most, have 
accounts in the thrifty savings bank, or in 
the building and loan association. There has 
never been a strike in the works, and from 
present appearances it does not seem as if 
there were likely to be. All differences be¬ 
tween the men and the company are adjusted 
at the office without calling in delegates from 
outside unions, and the men say that the 
company is always willing to hear what they 
propose and do whatever is right in the 
remedy of wrongs. Said one of them: 

“These electrical people are all white and 
we get right treatment from them. There 
was a little trouble in the foundry a while 
ago, but it was quieted in half an hour after 
a cal! at the office. If all the companies 
would act like that and treat us like gentle¬ 
men, there wouldn’t be any trouble. We 
don’t ask much, but when we do ask a thing 
we don’t like to be treated like a lot of 
cattle. We know that when pay night comes 
we are going to get our envelopes, and that 
is the main thing. Yes, the shops are well 
organized. It’s safe to^y that two-thirda 









































THE ELECTRIC TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


17 


of the men belong to unions and more thaii 
halt of them are married. A lot of them 
marry too soon, to my way of thinking.” 


RENTS NOT TOO 
HIGH FOR WAGES. 


In respect of rent¬ 
als Schenectady is 
not so fortunate 
as It was when 
times were hard. The growth of the works, as 
■well as of the locomotive and other factories 
In the town, has caused a lively demand lor 
houses and floors, and the supply Is hardly 
equal to It. Ordinary wooden houses at 
some distance from the factories bring $20 a 
month, and of late many houses have been di¬ 
vided into flats which rent at from $10 to $15 
a month. Still, where wages are good and 
place is relatively secure, these rates are 
hardly disproportionate. There is a row of 
two story wooden houses under a hill, with a 
great sand bank lor the view from the doors, 
in which the rents run as high as $13 for a 
single floor. T'he Polacks and Huns are 
getting In here, as may be known at a dls- 
ance by reason of the black hoods and red and 
blue handkerchiefs the women are so fond of 
wearing on their heads. The Irish wear 
shawls in all weathers, and the Italians wear 
either their own hair or else some gaudy 
handkerchiefs, in which are all the colors of 
the rainbow, and several others. 


On the hill, in the new section of the town, 
a large number of buildings have recently 
been put up, and many of these consist of 
two flats of six rooms each, renting at $11 
to $15. None of these houses are In solid 
rows, and they have all the appearance of 
private residences of the better class, with 
open ground about them, grass and flowers 


before them and no fences. A house of fair 
size in the older parts of the town commands 
from $30 to $50 a month. Rents have in¬ 
creased in three years 20 and 30 per cent., 
and landlords and real estate speculators are 
rubbing their hands and smiling clear around 
to their ears. 


The electric company has just bought 76 
acres of land from Union College and has 
graded and parceled it into lots, which it 
sells to its men at cost. The men are en¬ 
couraged in all ways to own their own 
homes, wherever the homes may be, and to 
become solid citizens of the town. As one of 
the officers remarked, “Men who own their 
own homes are stable, and are not likely to 
be controlled by hot-heads. Schenectady has 
been slow or conservative, and it has'not ap¬ 
preciated until recently the need of increas¬ 
ing its building industries. That is why we 
were forced to buy the land from Union Col¬ 
lege and provide places for our people. It is 
not a speculation. It is done in their inter¬ 
est. We are going to have a trolley line for 
them, and we have introduced it already at 
this end, for w'e have the track on our 
grounds and have built a waiting room for 
the people, which is handy in bad weather.” 


UNMARRIED MEN 
LIVE CHEAPLY. 


Naturally, the un¬ 
married men 'who 
do not live with 
relatives are board¬ 
ers in various parts of the city, most of them 
within easy reach of the works, and they pay 
from $3.50 to $5.50 a week for board. Some 
of them rent rooms for $1 to $1.25 a week and 
live at restaurants. There are dining rooms 
in the place that cater especially to younger 
clerks and mechanics, and that sell twenty- 
one meal tickets for $3. The men count on the 
sympathy and help of their employers in 
their social and charitable organizations, and 
w’henever they get up a benefit or fair or en¬ 
tertainment it is the custom of the company 
to diake donations and lend apparatus that 


will heighten their interest and increase the 
receipts. There was at one time an athletic 
field, with cinder path and tennis court on 
the grounds, but it was needed for new build¬ 
ings and had to be covered. It was used to 
some extent and some of the men are still 
interested in outdoor sports, but there is 
plenty of open ground near the town in which 
they can play ball or run races. There are 
many bicyclers and in good weather no less 
than 1,500 hands ride to and from their work. 
Sheds are put up for their wheels and a 
special gate and path are provided, so that 
they can enter the grounds without dis¬ 
mounting or encountering trucks or wagons 
or cars. Several social clubs are maintained 
by the employes and the local building and 
loan associations are composed chiefly of 
men in the electrical works. 

The mutual benefit association, now num¬ 
bering 350 members, with $6,000 in the bank, 
exacts a due of 50 cents a month and in re¬ 
turn pays $6 a week for thirteen consecutive 
weeks in case of illness, provided the mem¬ 
ber does not indulge in the luxury of ill¬ 
ness more than once a year. More unusual 
is an educational body called the General 
Electric Engineering Society, which is made 
up of ambitious men in the shops, who 
seriously wish to advance themselves in 
their calling, and who, to that end, read, 
study, experiment and discuss together, after 
hours. They have the advantage of the 
various and perfect appliances in the works 
to help them in their researches. This so¬ 
ciety is the elite of the works, of course, 
and includes most of the 200 college men 
who are employed there, as well as grad¬ 
uates of the technical schools who are at 
work in the testing departments. Indeed, a 
man must be a graduate of a technical school 


though the presence of so many pupils ought 
to suggest to some wide awake Yankee that 
he could found a substantial fortune by start¬ 
ing such a school in Schenectady. 


A. Recently Schenect- 

TECHNICAL BOOKS adyacqulred a free 
IN GREAT DEMAND. library with a 

reading room at¬ 
tached. There are between 6,000 and 7,000 
books on the shelves, beside papers and 
magazines on the tables. The mechanics 
make free use of the books and it is asserted 
that they often call for technical works. 
Their growing sons, however, do not make 
as much use of the books on physics, mag¬ 
netism and electricity as their fathers do, 
but the indisposition of children to follow in 
the footsteps of their parents and the as 
common indisposition of parents to have 
them do so, are accountable for this, pre¬ 
sumably. The librarians report that the be¬ 
havior of the mechanics is always good; that 
they are careful of the books they borrow; 
that they never appear at the library in¬ 
toxicated or noisy, and the same is told at 
the works themselves. The girls employed 
there are kept by themselves, encountering 
the men only in going to and from the shops, 
and their treatment by the men is almost 
invariably respectful. All religions are rep¬ 
resented, and a good many of the employes 
are church members. 


Some of the men have thriftily bought 
stock in the company and naturally there is 
CO discouragement of this practice. It affords 
all the greater incentive to a man to stick 
at his business,’since there is a promise not 
merely of increased wages, but of higher 
dividends. One laborer approached one of 9bs 



HOUSES OF POLES (TWO FLATS). 


or show an amount of technical and theoretic 
knowledge equal to that possessed by a grad¬ 
uate in order to secure employment in those 
departments. 

The presence in the works of these spe¬ 
cially trained and able men has a good in¬ 
fluence on the whole body of the working 
people. It makes them ambitious, emulous of 
their special knowledge, and hopeful of at¬ 
taining to their earnings. No less than 1,600 
of the workmen are studying electrical science 
on their own account, most of them in what 
are known as correspondence schools, there 
being no institution in the city itself that 
makes a specialty of this sort of teaching. 


ofBcers a while ago and asked to be enlight¬ 
ened as to a good many facts about the com¬ 
pany’s prospects and business. His questions 
were answered, and it then came out that a 
relative of his had died, leaving him sev¬ 
eral thousand dollars. He invested the whole 
of this in General Electric stock, but he keeps 
right on at his old work, putting on no airs 
and hoping for no immediate retirement. 

As to profit sharing, that has never been 
seriously considered. It is declared that 
where it is tried, at least in factories, the 
people cannot be made to understand why the 
selling expenses should be deducted before a 
dividend paying basis is announced. Th#y 































18 


THE ELECTRIC TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


think that the concern ought to pay on its 
gross rather than its net earnings—a proceed¬ 
ing that in most cases would involve it in 
bankruptcy. 

There has been a 

PIECE WORK PRO- notable change in 

MOTES INDUSTRY the industry and de¬ 
meanor of the men 
since piece work replaced week’s wages. The 
tendency to this arrangement, introduced in 
the great shoe shops of New England, is un¬ 
doubtedly growing, and so long as a man can 
be assured of steady work, is the fairest, both 
to himself and his employers. The division of 
labor into a thousand departments and sub¬ 
departments is making incomplete mechanics, 
but it makes each man a better mechanic in 
his specialty, and is making American goods 
so cheap and so much better than European 
goods of the same sort that the foreigners are 
unable to vie with us and are not able to pay 
such wages as our home companies. They are 
slowly adopting similar industrial principles 


on the other side of the water—driven to 
them in self defense. Ninety-eight per cent, 
of all the work in the General Electric shops 
is now done by the piece, and the output has 
been increased in some instances 40 per cent. 
In consequence, and fully 25 per cent, taking 
all departments together. This is partly due, 
however, to the night work, which is op¬ 
tional, but which allows a man to work until 
9 P. M., if he likes, and increase his earnings 
accordingly. On Saturday a half holiday is 
taken, the works closing at 1 o’clock in the 
afternoon. 

The influence of a great industry on a small 
city is, therefore, beneficial, so long as the 
industry is of a character to call tor intelli¬ 
gence, for with Intelligence go thrift, sobri¬ 
ety and the domestic virtues. In its effect on 
the people it may be compared almost to that 
■of a university. Where the industry is such 
as to call for mere crude physical force, it 
will bring into the place a cheap labor that 
is forced to content itself with a low wage, 
live meanly, often in unhealthful tenements. 


and spend too much of its earnings viciously 
and ignorantly. Every one in Schenectady 
has an interest in the continuance and success 
of the electric works, for the well being of 
the town depends in good part upon it. 
Whether the machines of the future can ever 
be brought to such marvelous precision as to 
do the work that is now done by hand, and 
must he thought out before it is done is 
doubtful. If it is possible, a cheaper com¬ 
pany of men may be brought into the town 
and the town will thereupon begin to run 
down. But to offset such a possibility it is 
well to remember that every enlargement of 
mechanical force and skill opens up indus¬ 
tries and enterprises that call for new appli¬ 
cations of brain and fresh acquirements of 
manual skill, and now that the age of steam 
is passing we are on the threshold of an 
electrical age that will probably offer to our 
children such wonders as we have not yet 
permitted ourselves to imagine as concrete 
gains in the service to man of the blind, but 
all powerful forces of nature. 


THE STEEL TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


Like the corpulent man who could no longer 
see his own feet, Chicago has grown so that 
she can no longer see herself, even from her 
Auditorium tower. It is not so much her ex¬ 
tent, however, that makes her extremities in¬ 
visible from the populative center, but her 
breath. She will eat soft coal, and as a 
consequence, she exhales carbon, so that she 
lies under a constant cloud. 

As you approach from the south, though 
you can see little or nothing of the town 
through the dingy reek that hangs above its 
roofs and that is breathed by its citizens, who 
frequently call it air, there is a spectacle at 
night that draws every stranger to the car 
windows. It appears to be a volcano in 
eruption. Vast clouds of smoke and steam 
rise toward the lake front and they are 
lighted from below as by the glare of an 
Aetna. Now and then a gush of vivid flame 
pierces the clouds that pour skyward from the 
earth and lights the edges of the vapor 
clouds that lower from overhead. Against the 
pulsing light may be seen at intervals tall, 
^lender chimneys, and it is from them that 
much of the smoky outpour comes. The place 
is South Chicago, and the cause of the erup¬ 
tion is the daily and nightly operation of the 
rolling mills. 

Here is the biggest steel mill in America, 
probably in the world, occupying 334 acres of 
land, representing a capital of $35,000,000 and 
employing 7,000 hands. It is one of several 
mills, the others being found in North Chi¬ 
cago, Milwaukee and Joliet, the total working 
force numbering 12,000 men. Approaching the 
principal mill ttom town you pass the melan¬ 
choly wastes that environ what was once the 
most beautiful spot of earth—the white city 
of 1893; more melancholy, because of the 
contrast they offer to the memory of that 
wonder. Of the buildings created for the 
fair only lour or five remain, and at a distance 
they seem lonely and neglected, the Fine Arts 
Palace, the Japanese Temple, the German 
Building and the copy of the Convent of La 
Rabida, which is now used as a creche. They 
still cling to the name of the Midway Plal- 
eance, but that which made it a pleasance is 
gone, and the squeal of the pipes for the 
danse du ventre is now heard at Coney Island. 


j In order to harmonize the scene of the Co- 
I lumbian exhibition more perfectly, they have 
I erected, as a part of the art bu'llding, a tall 
I chimney, which belches soft coal smoke, like 
j any other shop, and which suggests that they 
may be running a Corot or a Daubigny fac¬ 
tory in the basement. 


r-nni r»n»i rMn-r ^ tempered despair 
rUnLORNi DIRTY seizes you when you 

SOUTH CHICAGO/"®*^''7“ 7" 

at South Chicago, 
eight or nine miles from the civilized portion 
of the city. It is Chicago at its worst, gone 
considerably to seed; a forlorn, dirty, muddy, 
smoky, unkempt district, where everything is 
out of repair, and where you would like to 
turn the hose on, in order to wash it. They 
say its morals do not need washing so much 
as parts of the city proper, but that fact does 
not, unfortunately, make the place any pret¬ 
tier to look at. While there are rows of cheap 
looking flats, the older and commoner habi¬ 
tations appear to be wooden houses, two 
stories high, with attics, small and not very 
comfortable looking, and evidently occupied 
by more than one family apiece. The fences 
are broken, the doors are out of plumb, there 
are puddles and rags and tin cans in the front 
yards, there are gates off the hinges or miss¬ 
ing altogether, there are tubs and buckets 
and bottles on the back stairs leading from 
the yard into the houses, and over all is a 
dead, unpleasant color of dirty, yellowish 
gray. Some of the houses were painted that 
way to begin with, and the smoke from the 
rolling mills has added several coats. 

Immediately about the mill the populace 
appears to be Irish, if one may judge from 
the faces one sees in the streets and the 
names on the signs over the groceries and 
saloons, but a little westward from this a 
large settlement of Poles, Huns, Lithuanians, 
Servians, Swedes, Italians and other strange 
people we never knew much about until with¬ 
in a dozen years, has sprung up and is rapid¬ 
ly extending itself. 

That the Catholic is the prevailing reli¬ 
gion is evident enough from the size of the 
churches of that faith in the vicinity, and 
the Roman Church near the rolling mills on 
the north side of the city is said to be the 
)■ 


largest in respect of the number of its com* 
municants in the whole world. They are 
nearly all Poles. In the Eastern cities we 
know the Russian and his neighbors as Jews, 
but hereabouts they are Catholics or follow¬ 
ers of the Greek Church. 

But while poverty and squalor appear to 
prevail in this region It is not safe to assume 
that there is any suffering. These people can 
and do often live on what an American fam¬ 
ily would throw away. The children one en¬ 
counters in the streets are not dull or ill fed, 
if lively pranks and loud voices and red 
cheeks are indications to the contrary, and, 
as in the mills, there appears to be a tacit 
understanding that race differences shall be 
Ignored. That there is feeling, however, is 
plain enough. The older inhabitants regard 
this inroad of Slavs and Czechs with dis¬ 
pleasure. Said one of the machinists: 

“I’m thinking there’s too many of these 
— Polacks getting in. I haven’t any quar¬ 
rel with ’em, but I don’t mix with ’em. They 
don’t mix much, anyhow. They w’lll work 
pretty hard, in their way, and they earn good 
money. They work twelve hours a day and 
some of ’em fourteen. They just regular 
work ’emselves out—fall into something or 
get burnt or broken up and are lugged to the 
company’s hospital and pretty soon the wagon 
comes and carries ’em off, and that’s the end. 
They haven’t any friends who care enough 
about ’em to look after ’em, and most of ’em 
w'hen they come here ain’t married, so when 
they croak nobody cries.’’ 


TOILERS NEED 


Many of these new¬ 
comers are unable to 


INTERPRETERS. speak or understand a 

' word of English, and 
it is only possible for them to work as mem¬ 
bers of gangs in which some of their com¬ 
panions understand the vernacular and trans¬ 
late for them. They are clanqish, but it may 
be that the reason for this is protective, in¬ 
asmuch as they can feel that if they were to 
fall into the hands of strangers the strangers 
might "do’’ them. 

These Goths and Huns and Polacks are de¬ 
scribed by one employer as “draft horses.’’ 
He finds them useful for heavy, plodding la¬ 
bor, but crude material for any other sort. 
They are close-mouthed, furtive and not al- 


4 
















THE STEEL TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


I 


19 


ways honest. If, one Is discharged for any 
breach of the moral code, or for inefficiency, 
or for any other reason, the chance is that 
he will be back at the shop in a couple of 
months with his whiskers cut off, or a dif¬ 
ferent suit from the one he used to wear, or. 
If driven to the last extremity for a disguise, 
he may have bathed, and he presents himself 
as an entire stranger looking for work, and 
his name is now John Smith. 

At the steel works they are pretty closely 
watched since their pilfering habits became 
known. Their favorite way of smuggling 
goods out of the mills and the grounds is to 
carry them in their dinner palls. The sharp 
eyed guardians at the gate, who hold up 
everybody, watch these pails to see it any of 
them appear unduly heavy, and if man shifts 
them from hand to hand often. In such a 
case the man will be stopped, the pail ex¬ 
amined and the stolen articles, if any such 
are there, recovered. One of the Poles was 
caught a little while ago with forty-five 
pounds of brass concealed in his pail and his 


cent cigars in their mouths and hands in 
their trousers pockets—that is, what they 
do when not loafing. 


LITTLE ONES 
NEED NO PITY. 


And the children, who 
are obviously the sons 
and daughters and 
younger brothers and 
sisters of some of them—what are they to be 
when they grow up? But isn’t it a waste of 
sympathy to pity these smutty faced and 
grimy little cubs? Is there not a good chance 
that they are happier than the little ones 
who ride in the parks, dressed until their 
bones ache? You can see that some of these 
younkers are not neglected. The rents in 
their apparel have been repaired, their faces 
have been washed, at some time in their 
lives, and in some of the homes an attempt 
has been made to brighten their surroundings. 
Here and there are windows with curtains 
of cotton lace and pots and stands of flowers 
blooming in the smudge. 

Entering at the main gate, through the high 
fence that surrounds the works, except where 


might stand in front of one of the Bessemer 
converters just as it was tipped, and burned 
as full of holes as a colander. 

For there are dangers in the steel business, 
though the accidents nearly all result from 
carelessness, and it is these dangers, together 
with the heat and strain and wear of the 
deafening racket, rather than skill, that cause 
good wages to be paid to the workers. While 
you wait the reluctant permission to go 
through the property, you watch the men who 
cross from the shops to the gate, going home 
at the end of their eight hour shift. They are 
nearly all youngish, they are commonplace 
in appearance and behavior; they are coarsely 
dressed, in overalls that bear a reddish stain; 
they wear Jackets buttoned to their throats, 
they smoke short pipes and carry tin dinner 
pails. 

AI I UAWC TUP Commonly there is a 
nMVu Inu Chicago look about the 

CHICAGO LOOK. mouth and jaw. You 

mustn’t ask what that 
look is, at least so long as you are in or near 



THE ROLLING MILLS OF SOUTH CHICAGO AS SEEN FROM THE LAKE, 


pockets. He was turned over to the authori¬ 
ties. 

There is some drunkenness. It is to be 
looked for in a place so abounding in saloons, 
yet there is less than one would suppose. 
The company is not tolerant of shortcomings 
in this particular, and the man who fails to 
walk upright to and from and about his work 
must prepare to quit it. Formerly the mix¬ 
ing of races in the works led to considerable 
fighting in the shops and about the yards. 
This, too, was suppressed with Instant and 
exemplary dismissals, and now the incon¬ 
gruous multitude dwells together at its busi¬ 
ness without breach of the peace. 

As you pass along the streets where It 
has housed Itself, you can hardly repress the 
wish that a second Mrs. O’Leary’s cow would 
kick over another lamp in this quarter and 
start another fire, for South Chicago might 
arise from the ashes of such a calamity re¬ 
generated, as the main part of the town did 
nearly thirty years ago. One asks himself 
what all the bands of loafers are doing who 
*re dawdling before the saloons with five 


the thirty or forty railroad tracks go into it, 
you are stopped at a watchman’s lodge and 
made to give an account of yourself. Your 
name and business are telephoned to the 
office, and if you are a peddler or a book 
agent or a poor relation or a riding dele¬ 
gate, just resign hope, for you will get no 
farther. Visitors are not welcomed at the 
South Chicago steel works. If by good chance 
you are allowed to go through, under guard, 
you will be stopped in every building and 
required to show your pass, which will then 
be punched, in order to show afterward that 
the sentries there have done their duty. Nor 
will photography be countenanced. The rea¬ 
son for this prohibition is said to lie in a 
regard for the photographer himself, since. 
In his artistic enthusiasm, while trying to 
secure Rembrandt effects in some of the 
rooms, he might pause too long and be run 
into by one of the dozens of locomotives that 
are whizzing in every direction or knocked 
over by a traveling crane or trolley stoker, 
or cavorting rail or plate of red hot steel, 
or disastrously mixed up with a blast, or he 


Chicago, for that town Is seriously devoting 
Itself to culture and hopes before long to get 
ahead of Boston. She has a sign up forbid¬ 
ding any more dumping In the lake front 
park, and has learned to stamp her feet in 
the right place at Mr. Thomas’ concerts, and 
she has one box for waste paper, and there 
is a studio with a show window in which the 
artist can exhibit what he does, and she has 
had grand opera. The rolling mill men are not 
regular attendants at the opera, but it is 
expected that they will be, some time. 

The sight seeing begins at the lake front, 
where the queer, scow-like craft that infre¬ 
quently ply the lonely waters of the inland 
seas draw up to discharge cargo. This com¬ 
monly cousists of iron ore, and some of these 
ungainly tubs will hold more than 7,000 tons 
of it. An ingenious hoist lifts it out of the 
hold, after it has already been shoveled by 
steam into something like a dredge, and lugs 
it to the top of a runway whence it is car¬ 
ried back and emptied upon a mountain of 
ore. Next, it is carried by Huns and Polacki 
to the furnaces, for the making of steel b»» 

V 










































20 


THE STEEL TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


gins here at the beginning. The iron has first 
to be smelted into pigs, and then is turned 
Into steel. The eight blast furnaces have a 
daily capacity of 350 tons apiece and the year¬ 
ly output is 600,000 tons of rails and billets, 
and 85,000 tons of plates. The ore is heaped 
Into different hills, according to its grade, and 
is hauled to the furnaces on iron roads, which 
give footing to the men who trundle the bar- 
rows, and surface for the wheels in what 
.would otherwise be Chicago mud—a dreadful 
composition. Limestone and coke is delivered 
through shutes in a vast and dust filled shed. 
Into cars that carry them to the furnaces. 

In the hot blast stoves—constructions large 
enough for tenements but entirely uninhabit¬ 
able—the heat is manufactured out of cold air 
and inflammatory coke gas. The heated air 
is then directed with tremendous roaring into 
cupolas where the ore is waiting to be melted, 
and on tapping at the bottom the metal runs 
off into a giant gridiron drawn into the sand, 
each bar of which becomes a pig of iron. 
Streams of water are constantly running 
over these cupolas in order to cool the out¬ 
side and keep them from being burned 
through. After the iron is disposed of, the 
lighter slag is withdrawn into ladles await¬ 
ing on flat cars in a sunken railroad, and they 
are then hauled away to become part of new 
land which is being built out into the lake, 
or to the cement works close by, for slag has 
Its uses now. 

PI app ^ shadowy room are 
nioixl iLMLP to bg seen some dozen 

TO WORK blowers that are forcing 

the hot air into the fur¬ 
naces with a loud and constant roar. Were a 
man to be caught in one of those draft pipes 
he would be whisked away to his death as 
lightly as a feather, and only a slightly in¬ 
creased per cent, of calcium in the slag would 
show where he had arrived. When there is 
waste gas it is used to run the engines, and 
it perfumes the vicinity with an odor like ex¬ 
ceeding ancient cheese. 

Now we come to the most picturesque de¬ 
partment of all—the room where three Bes¬ 
semer converters, of fourteen tons’ capacity 
apiece, are throwing up fountains of dazzling 
white fire under the push of air that enters 
beneath the boiling iron at a pressure of 
twenty pounds to the square inch. Steel has 
spattered over the premises, making thick 
crusts and cushions on the uprights and beams 
and girders. A steam railroad enters the 
premises and empties the iron from the blast 
furnace into these converters, together with 
the splegeleisen, which contains the necessary 
manganese, and the fierce blast blows 145 
“heats,” aggregating 1,773 tons, every twelve 
hours. The largest week’s output'was 17,859 
tons. Ten years ago eighty blows a day were 
counted a large average. The converters re¬ 
semble huge mortars more than anything else 
and swing on trunnions in the same way as 
cannon. ' 

W^hen the time has come for pouring, a man 
on the opposite side of the mill, who waits 
with his hand on a lever, sounds a whistle, 
which is a warning to get out of the way, and 
tips the bulk of metal downward. It is like 
the discharge of a monstrous gun, except 
for the report, though it by no means keeps 
Silence, either. As the mouth of the furnace 
comes forward there is a tremendous burst of 
sparks which are hurled all over the place. 
They burn where they alight, but only for a 
moment, for the particles of metal are smaller 
than would be supposed. The big space is 
Illumined as by a glare of the sun. A ladle 
receives the metal, and electrical power 
swings it across the mill to a track where a 
train of little cars is waiting for it, each car 
ksarlng a long, square-sided iron pot which is 


the mold of an ingot weighing over twelve 
tons. The metal is as fluid as milk as it is 
poured in. These molds with their loads of 
steel are carried to a yard, where they are 
stripped off, leaving the forms of metal as 
long, square-sided masses glowing with red 
heat. They are hurried on to the “soaking 
room” to be reheated, for the sooner they get 
there the less heat will be needed to prepare 
them for the rollers. After the reheating the 
ingot is lifted by a crane to the runway of the 
rolling mill, and here begins that process of 
rolling, in at one groove of a pair of cylinders, 
back through another, the metal constantly 
and quickly moving on rollers, and passed 
from one machine to another until what was 
a few minutes ago a huge bulk of steel is 
now a collection of rails. The presses or roll- 



OF JAPANESE. 


In the Rolling Mill Section of Chicago, 
Ill. 

ers are kept streaming with water in order to 
cool them. An ingot will yield about thirty 
rails, weighing 76 pounds to the yard and 30 
feet long. 

By the time the rails reach the saws that 
are to cut the long and more or less distorted 
strips into 30 and 40 foot lengths, the heat is 
somewhat lessened, yet as the saws bite into 
them there is a great display of fireworks. 

_The rails are then 

WON APPLAUSE lifted by automatic 

arms—a couple of 
Japanese engineers, 
who were recently in the shop, broke into ap¬ 
plause, as in a theater, when they saw how 
neatly the arms picked up the pieces—and laid 
on a rack, where hydraulic power pushes and 
piles them and shoves them over on a flat car 
that is run in to receive them. The locomo¬ 
tive that runs this car has a dumping at¬ 
tachment, and the rails are thrown off with 
a hideous clamor. After they have gone into 
another shop, where they are drilled to re¬ 
ceive the bolts that will fasten them to the 
ties, when they are laid in track form, the 
rails are for sale. 

I The foundry where shop supplies are cast, 

I the engine rooms, the electric light station, 
j the machine shops are the usual sort of 
I things, and we pass them with a glance, en- 
I tering next the shop where steel plates are 
made. The process is practically the same as 
that in the rail mill, except that instead of 
being squeezed through ever decreasing aper¬ 
tures. the ingots are rolled under ponderous 
cylinders and crushed out into flatter and flat¬ 
ter forms. At one stage in ttie process they 
are apt to scale, and to remove the bits of 
crust a shovelful of salt is thrown over the 
plate. As it passes under the roller and the 
salt is pressed against the red hot metal, there 
is a volley as from a regiment of riflemen. 
After being pressed into thick slabs 
the «teel in this mill is again heated 


REVOLUTION. 


in relatively small furnaces, from whence 
it it plucked out by the Immense arm 
of a “charging car,” a ponderous trolley 
running up and down a track before these fire 
pits. When the plates are finished they are 
still too hot and cumbrous to handle, and the 
device whereby they are lifted to the rollers 
that will deliver them to the shears is ingen¬ 
ious. It is an electro magnet, or, rather, 
seven magnets, hanging from a beam that is 
lowered over the plate and picks it up as 
easily as a child picks up its toy, dropping it 
with another uproar, for there are more dif¬ 
ferent noises here than you can count, and ail 
of them loud ones. The plates fall, of course, 
when the electric current is shut off. 

• Then you can see the furnaces in which 
scrap steel is melted and the trolley crane 
that fills them, with a spoon holding nearly 
a ton. It pushes this spoon in at the red 
mouth of the furnace and turns it over and 
over to make sure that every piece has fallen 
out. All the machinery employed in hauling 
and lifting has necessarily to be of the stout¬ 
est, and there are cranes in the shop that lift 
seventy-five tons. Yet the movement of these 
masses is singularly free. In the open hearth 
process of steel making the molten metal 
passes into furnaces which are like huge hori¬ 
zontal boilers. These furnaces roll over and 
discharge the metal from a spout. Some of 
the heating here ii done by the burning of oil, 
and the oil is pumped all the way from Ohio 
into tanks on the ground. 

, lOTDl AI sense these 

AN INDUS I nIAL miils are the most im¬ 
portant of all our in¬ 
dustries, inasmuch as 
all other mechanic industries have come to 
depend greatly on steel. The aluminum age 
has not arrived, and may not. Steel is strong, 
ductile and reliable, and will continue to be 
used for a long time to come for machines 
and implements of every description. The 
changes wrought by the relatively cheap and 
certain Bessemer process have largely revo¬ 
lutionized the Industry, and have made steel 
cheaper than iron was not long ago. Its char¬ 
acter and quality, too, have changed. Steel 
used to be iron containing, say 2 per cent, of 
carbon. Bessemer, or low grade steel, has 1-10 
of 1 per cent. now. It is iron minus its asso¬ 
ciations of sulphur and phosphorus, ■which, 
if not removed, make the metal brittle and 
hard to weld. The old treatment was to put 
the iron into powdered charcoal and heat it 
to redness. It absorbed carbon in that pro¬ 
cess. Afterward it was packed in a crucible 
with oxide of manganese and melted* up for 
casting. In case hardening, as in the making 
of certain parts of bicycles, where a certain 
elasticity of core is desired, with a tough 
outside rind for the metal, similar, processes 
are yet in vogue, and the outer hardening of 
Harveylzed steel for plates of war ships is 
similar. Modern steel is virtually a mangan¬ 
ese iron. This alloy, known as splegeleisen, 
from the mlrror-llke, or spiegel-llke faces of 
its crystals, carries 5 per cent, of carbon. 
Oxygen has a keen fondness for manganese 
and, hence, leaves the iron in the melting to 
form the earthy and sometimes glassy oxide 
called slag. Thus cleared of oxygen, jtha 
metal is sound and strong. 

It occurred to Henry Bessemer of England 
that the same results could be secured if a 
blast were run through the molten metal— 
and here we have a curious Illustration of the 
fact that it is not always the wisest even 
in his specialty who does the most or the 
best, even.as the mining engineer and the 
geologist are always the people who do not 
find paying lodes and gold bearing gravel. 
Bessemer did not know as much about steel 
as many a man in South Chicago knows. 7 «i 




















THE STEEL TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


21 


he had hit upon a great discovery, and, 
though he was flouted and though he met with 
reverses and faiiures, his converter for pour¬ 
ing air through meited metal is in use all 
over the world to-day, and the old fashioned 
way of making steel in bits in crucibiles is 
practically done away with. Manganese in 
spiegeleisen is added to purify the metal still 
farther, as it has been found that the air 
blast does leave some refractory substance, 
and, a mixture of silica, dolomite and mag¬ 
nesite is likewise used, since their affinity for 
phosphorus frees the iron almost wholly from 
that substance. It becomes phosphate of lime 
in the slag, and is a useful fertilizer. 

APPRECIATED BY H 20!," sll £ 

THE MARINERS. reaches every part of 

the metal and, as 
some of the Impurities are inflammable, they 
become a part of the fuel. As the silica be¬ 
gins to burn there are sparks and dust; then 
the carbon is liberated in flame that lights 
the clouds and makes South Chicago a' 
Pharos, guiding the Infrequent mariner on 
Lake Michigan to a beloved haven where 
liquor can be bought on Sunday. Spiegeleisen 
is added and in ten or twelve minutes the 
blow ie over. While this process has greatly 
cheapened the output, so that steel is lower 
In cost than iron used to be, it has also in¬ 
creased the use of steel to such an extent that 
more men are employed in the iron industries 
and their wages are higher than ever before. 

A strange landscape is that presented as 
you look over the new land from the back of 
the mills toward the lake. It is like a scene 
on the moon or the background of a Poe 
story or a dream of Dore. There is in all the 
view not a visible foot of soil, nor a spear 
of grass. Possibly there may be such plains 
In Greenland or the Antarctic continent, al¬ 
though they have their vegetation, usually. 
The color is gray and brown, for what should 
be soil ie sharp and full of upheavals. This 
Is all slag. The great pots of molten scum 
are carried here by cars and piled in fan¬ 
tastic confusion over the earth. Nearer to 
the buildings are “skulls” or remains of 
metal from the ladles, showing their rounded 
forme; great shells that are mixed with other 
remnants, to be broken up by the fall of 
heavy balls and melted over. “Skulls” is the 
right name for them, for, as you see them in 
the twilight, they might be taken at a little 
distance for the heads of antediluvian mon¬ 
sters—the creatures from which we derive the 
dragon mythe. 

Where the ore is landed the waste hot water 
from the mills is poured in a steaming tor¬ 
rent that often kills fish, as you may see a 
few yards away where a man Is skimming 
the water in a tank that leaks In from the 
lake. This tank or Inclosure is virtually a 
strainer to keep out fish, hold-up victims and 
other things that would obstruct the pipes, 
but thousands of boiled fish do pass in through 
crevices between the timbers. Thus strained 
the water passes into the boilers. 

Though they are among the most fortunate 
of manual laborers in respect of pay, the men 
of the South Chicago mills are not so excel¬ 
lent a class as the workers in many other in¬ 
dustries. They get good pay because their 
work Is hard, their hours are long and they 
are exposed to some dangers that do not occur 
In cotton mills and printing shops. It is not 
a sort of work that calls for the highest in¬ 
telligence, but rather for steadiness and 
strength. Machinery has largely supplanted 
hand labor, and the bands help the machines. 
Instead of the machines the hands. This 
must be so in a rolling mill, because of the 


size of the Ingots, rails and plates and the 
tact that they are passed to the rolls in a red 
heat precludes the possibility of handling 
them, in the ancient understanding of that 
term. Cranes, trolleys, pneumatic and elec¬ 
trical pushers and haulers and dozens of 
small locomotives do the lifting and moving 
and the men must see that these machines 
are kept to their business. In the racket of 
the mills spoken orders and requests are out 
of the question, so the men answer to signals 
on steam whistles, as soldiers respond to 
bugle calls. When there is a shortage of 
plates in the shearing shop, for instance, you 
hear a series of sharp yelps from the whistles 
above the clangor, that expresses the impa¬ 
tience of men who are paid by the ton for the 
steel they cut and who do not like to be de¬ 
layed. 


The yard men and help- 
V^ORK HARDj ers work twelve hours 

rAT UUUU. rung from 10 cents an 
hour for beginners to 27% cents an hour for 
the machinists and other more expert me¬ 
chanics, with half as much again for over¬ 
time. On Sundays the mills nominally close, 
but this is for repairs ' and . preparations. 
“Work Sundays!” exclaimed one of the men. 
“Yes; it’s our busiest time. We get paid by 
the fortnight, and' I’ve made my $54 in a 
couple of weeks. 'We fellows all do pretty 
well. W’e live in bouses or comfortable flats. 
The company,' when it bought land here to 
extend the mills, bought a number of houses 
and it lets them out to us. We pay anywhere 
from $13 a month up for six room flats around 
here. It's a little high, but I don’t know 
where you can do better. W’e get our pay in 
checks. No, there’s no trouble about getting 
rid of them. The trouble is to get enough of 


rolling mills. In the mass the hands are not 
men of education. There is. Indeed, a coa« 
siderable percentage of Illiteracy, largely 
among the recently landed citizens. The am¬ 
bition to know more and be better that pos¬ 
sesses the people of most other parts of 
America does not so largely affect these work¬ 
ers. They appreciate the advantages of edu¬ 
cation, and usually send their children, at 
least to the parochial schools, but for them- 
selT^s they are either satisfied with their 
places or consider that they are too old to 
learn. The Swedes, Germans, Englishmen, 
Scotchmen and Welshmen try to perfect them¬ 
selves and are advanced as soon as they prove 
their aptitude, but the people from southern 
aud eastern Europe remain laborers to the 
end. 


HEREDITARY 
IRON WORKERS. 


It is a noteworthy 
fact that wherever 
there are rolling mills 
W’elshmen will be 
found. They are iron men by heredity. It 
would appear, and naturally gravitate to the 
mills. Nearly always, too, they become me¬ 
chanics and attain to places of some conse¬ 
quence, as compared with those who remain 
hewers and lifters. It is claimed that an 
average daily wage here is $2.50 and that 
laborers earn $1.80, but this varies, because 
although piece work is hardly possible where 
such masses have to be handled, something 
like it has been established in paying for work 
by the ton or contract. A gang of laborers 
who agreed to unload a certain number of 
cars, at a fixed sum per year, will naturally 
unload as many cars as possible in a given 
time. This tendency to pay the nlen for ex¬ 
actly what they do, rather than for what they 
might do, is increasing everywhere. Actors 
with five line parts view it with alarm and 



HOSPITAL FOR ROLLING MILL EMPLOYES. 


them. Any saloon around here will take 
them and glad to, for they’re as good as 
United States bills. Oh, the company’s all 
right. We ain’t fixing up any trouble for it.” 

There are some of the men In the labora¬ 
tories who have to be men of mathematical 
mind aud chemical skill and of course they 
are better off than the shop men in the 
matter of pay. It is they who make the tests 
for quality of ores and metal and make ap¬ 
parently abstruse calculations as to strength 
and tensility by means of tables of figures, 
and rulers that measure a thousandth of an 
inch, after a chunk of steel has been pulled in 
two in a machine, or has been bent to show 
its suppleness. It takes but a few minutes to 
stretch a bar large enough for a chisel from 
eight to over ten inches, and you can feel 
it draw beneath your fingers Just before it 
bursts apart. 

Such men are the exception, however. In 


editorial writers whose literature Is held 
over for a week consider it with despair. 

While the usual day’s work Is twelve hours, 
there are many hands employed in parts of 
the mills where the heat is exhausting and 
the labor severe, who get off with eight hours. 
There are three shifts a day of eight hour 
men. and two of the twelve hour men. The 
latter shifts are changed so that the night 
workers of one week are the day workers of 
the next. Such of them as are called upon 
to work overtime, or who have the chance to 
do so, commonly avail themselves of the op¬ 
portunity, because it means not merely added 
pay, but pay at an increased rate. 

It has been said that the men are not an 
educated class. The reason alleged is that 
they enter the mills at the age of 16 or 16, 
being an uneasy, discontented lot who chafo 
under the restraints of school,and,havlng one* 
secured a place where they can make 



















22 


THE STEEL TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


lose all interest in matters outside of their 
work and their homes. Some of them are 
densely ignorant, and it is told of one that 
he cannot figure out his own wages. If they 
keep their eyes open while they are serving 
as laborers and helpers, they can. neverthe¬ 
less. learn enough to advance them over the 
heads of some men who have been to school. 
As a plass they are healthy, for working in 
Iron seems to make strong men. “Healthy? 
Yes.” said one of the mill officers. “They 
hang on til! we have to kick them out.” '^[^his 
seems surprising when the length and severity 
of the hours are taken into consideration, and 
the men have but three holidays a year: 
Christmas. Fourth of July and Labor Day. 


relations be- 

STEEL WORKERS tween the company 

HAVE A LIBRARY. "7 

business-like. No ef- 
lort is made to make the grounds attractive, 
and it would be almost impossible to beautify 
a rolling mill. There is a base ball club, but 
there are no insurance societies, debating so¬ 
cieties or anything of that sort. The South 
Chicago Steel Workers’ Club is a social or¬ 
ganization of some consequence, however, that 
supports a small library and reading room, 
and the company gives a certain sum a month 
to this lor its running expenses. The read¬ 
ing room is not in or near the mills. 

While the laborers and helpers are not, as 
a rule, members of labor unions, from 50 to 
75 per cent, of the skilled men are organized. 
The company has had little trouble with its 
men, but if trouble is threatened it has al¬ 
ways taken a firm stand and has constantly 
fought interference. It recognizes but one 
union, and that is the Amalgamated Workers. 


But though it regards its men simply as ser¬ 
vants, it has established one notable thing for 
their benefit: a free hospital, on the grounds 
of the works. This is a model institution, 
constructed and managed in conformity with 
the most recent sanitary devices, and has been 
of great advantage to the men. Most of the 
accidents are avoidable, but that circumstance 
is overlooked, and a valuable and faithful man 
receives his pay while he is under the doctor’s 
care. Just as if he were at work. There are 
forty beds in this hospital and there have been 
here more than twenty patients at a time, 
though fifteen would be an average number. 
No medical cases are received—only surgical. 
Among so many thousand men somebody is suer 
to be burned, bruised, cut, crushed, shocked or 
bumped every day, or to suffer from a fall 
of ore on his head, or a fall from a scaffold 
or ladder, and he is at once taken to the hos¬ 
pital, bathed, put into clean linen and sent 
to bed. There are two surgeons, beside a sur¬ 
geon in chief, who lives in the city; two 
nurses: one lor day service, and the other for 
night, while the Janitor is also a nurse who 
can be called on in emergencies. In the base¬ 
ment will be found two Chinese cooks. 

The floors are of cement, the walls are tile 
or are finished in a hard enamel, the corners 
Of rooms are rounded, so as to prevent lodg¬ 


ment of dust, all instruments, gores, bandages 
and so forth are sterilized, there are an elec¬ 
tric elevator and appliances for the mov¬ 
ing of patients: a light operating room, 
an X ray room, a laundry with electric man¬ 
gle and dryer that does not expose the cloth¬ 
ing to the smoky air; a kitchen with oil range, 
and the boiler room, and store room are as 
clean as many parlors. While convalescing, 
the men enjoy perfect liberty, such as they 
can have in no other hospital, and a hall Is 
provided for them where they can lounge, talk, 
read, play cards and smoke. The two bright 
young doctors in charge are alert and skill¬ 
ful, and the men are far better off than they 
would be if they had to make the long Journey 
to town in trains or ambulances, after receiv¬ 
ing an injury. 

WORKERS DONT nof'ea'd 

TAKE TO BOOKS. the Police Gazette at 

the breakfast table 
and do not always keep cuspidors in the par¬ 
lor have expressed a kindly concern for the 
welfare of the rolling mill districts and have 
been there to talk art and literature, but truth 
to tell, with little result. Chicago has a 
splendid public library, but the station in 
South Chicago does less business than any 
other in the city. Last year some stations 
called for as many as 54,000 books, but South 
Chicago wanted only 10,000. And this is not 
merely because there are so many foreigners 
there, for the library caters to all the cosmop¬ 
olites within its borders. It has books and 
papers in German, Bohemian, Dutch, French, 
Polish, Norse, Danish, Swedish, Greek, Italian, 
Croat, Lithuanian, Esthlandic and Spanish, 
and even takes two papers from Hawaii. That 
these publications are so little called for does 
not discourage the library authorities, how¬ 
ever. They are rather surprised that a man 
who has been working like a mule from dawn 
till dark should want to read, or do anything 
but swallow his supper and turn in. Crime is 
not rampant. The arrests in the rolling mill 
district last year were below the city average. 

Apropos of the attempt to disseminate cul¬ 
ture, South Chicago at least does not follow 
the example of the stock yards. A branch 
of the library with light reading and picture 
papers was once established out there on the 
edge of civilization, where the people wade 
home from their day’s work in blood. For 
a while the novelty of the thing rather ap¬ 
pealed to the natives. The men would take 
a bottle or two of whisky with them and put 
it on a reading desk and read and drink 
till they became drowsy, when they would 
put their fiasks in their pockets and go home. 
But the hoodlums of the district resented this 
innovation as dangerous to the liberties of the 
precinct. They would assemble about the read¬ 
ing room in the evening and pound on the win¬ 
dows and Jeer at the dudes who were bright¬ 
ening their Intellects inside. The superin¬ 
tendent of the room was a husky lad who 
viewed these proceedings with disapproval, 


and he frequently charged into the street and 
•drove away the disturbers. 

A TDIMAllDU evening he was 

A InlUmrn waited on by a deputa- 

nC I UAPMIMU tion of about twenty 
LtAnIvllMU. hoodlums, who told him 

that he must go into a vacant lot near by, as 
soon as the library closed, and fight it out 
with their leader, as they had stood nearly 
enough from him. He consented, met his 
man, gave him a fine larruping and thereby 
won the affectionate admiration of the whole 
crowd. The roughs never bothered the read¬ 
ers any more. But, possibly because the read¬ 
ers missed the excitements, the attendance 
fell away and the library station passed into 
desuetude. The stock yard district is still be¬ 
yond the pale. 

Of the people in the rolling mill sections 
who do use the books, the Bohemians are 
considered as the dirtiest and most destruc¬ 
tive. They do not respect literature. They 
carry It into their kitchens and spatter grease 
over it, put the lamp on it, return it torn and 
smeared and dog’s eared. Some of the wreck¬ 
ing, however, is a result of printing Bohemian 
books on inferior paper. The fifty-nine sta¬ 
tions and six reading rooms of the public li¬ 
brary do two-thirds of all its work, and the 
number of thefts is surprisingly small. The 
best patronized of the stations are in the 
boarding house districts where clerks and 
mechanics are housed in dreary 7 by 9 rooms 
without heat, and these people escape to the 
reading rooms to forget their sufferings. 

It is likewise of moment to know that the 
fine arts museum is appreciated by the work¬ 
ing classes and that It has more visitors than 
any other art museum in America—more by 
several thousand (578,000 last year) than the 
Metropolitan Museum of New York or the 
finely appointed Art Museum of Boston. While 
the Dore and Tissot exhibitions were here, the 
attendance on free days was from 14,000 to 
15,000 people. Every public school teacher 
was requested to bring his or her class, in the 
belief that the children would tell their par¬ 
ents and induce them to come, and this was 
really the result. There were boys and girls 
from the stock yard districts, born in Chicago, 
who had never seen Lake Michigan, and who, 
when they looked out on it from the windows 
of the museum, asked their teachers what 
river it was, or if it was the Atlantic Ocean. 

It is estimated that two-thirds of the attend¬ 
ance at the museum is of working people, in¬ 
cluding Italians, Poles and Huns, some of 
whom go about the galleries with smoldering 
cigars In their fingers, but a look of genuine 
admiration on their faces. It is not unusual 
to come upon little knots of women with 
gaudy shawls on their heads and brass Jew¬ 
elry in their ears, nor upon young men in 
Jumpers and sweaters, and these are the very 
people that a museum should do most for. 
Among the 1,100 pupils in the art schools, 
who are learning to design tile, metal work, 
Jewelry and so on, many are the children of 
parents in humble life. 

What with her missions, her schools, her 
libraries, her museums and her mayor, Chi¬ 
cago hopes in time to become the Athens of 
the new world. 













\ 


I 


THE PALACE CAR TRIST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


There Is as yet no science of sociology. 
Herbert Spencer, it Is true, has tossed off a 
few dozen volumes in which he relates in his 
peculiarly blithesome and debonnair fashion 
how the apperception of ethical initiative as 
related to the presentative and representa¬ 
tive and re-representative feelings arising 
from consociation of non-ethical—but there; 
why deprive the good man of the privilege 
of delivering this airy persiflage for 
himself? When a more explicit and com¬ 
prehensible system of sociology grows out 
of the beginnings that we see in the vague, 
dreary and statistical material that obtains 


death never quite understood his people or 
his town. 

Some years ago he said; ‘T believe the 
better you house a workman the better citi¬ 
zen you make him. I have flowers in front 
of every house in Pullman. Their humaniz¬ 
ing influence reaches through the mothers 
and the children to the fathers. But the 
more you do tor some people the less they like 
it The best dramatic talent that comes to 
Chicago I bring over to Pullman to play at 
lower prices; yet some of my men still go into 
Chicago to the theater. Rent is a third 
cheaper here than in Chicago, yet some will 


and no chance to dress except by piling out 
and standing on the floor. The car is not 
perfect yet, and will not be until one can 
dress once more in an upright position, but 
it is a great Improvement on the car of 1864. 

Having made the car what it is, he set up 
his big works on the shores of Lake Calumet, 
south of Chicago. He bought 3,000 acres and 
his city grew like magic, until to-day there 
are about 1,500 houses there, and 97 per cent, 
of them are occupied. It was a flat, marshy, 
dismal district before, whereas now it is one 
of the most charming little towns in the 
world. He called in the aid of the architect 



OFFICES OF THE CAR SHOPS. 


at present, account will have to be taken of 
the now neglected element of human nature. 
And in the writing of that system there 
will be some record of the town of Pullman. 

This is or was the most important effort 
to create and maintain an ideal city that 
has ever been made in America. It was made 
by no theorist, either. It was born in the 
brain of a country lad who had won his way 
to fortune by shrewdness and industry, and 
who knew no more and cared no more about 
sociology and such than Herbert Spencer 
could know or care about humor. He was 
building some great car shops near Chicago 
and he wanted to house his working force 
properly. He supposed that if he gave his 
men clean, soundly built homes with lawns 
and gardens and parks and fine streets and 
secured their families against the evils that en¬ 
ter big cities, and afforded schools, libraries, 
churches and entertainments for them, and 
did all this at less expense for rent than 
they paid for tenements in the squalid quar¬ 
ters of the town he would be doing a favor 
to them They did not look at it in that way. 
At least many of them did not. And the 
chance is that Mr. Pullman to the day of his 


WAS RESENTED. 


ride twenty-eight miles a day for the sake 
of living in a crowded, dirty tenement in¬ 
stead of a clean and cozy home." 

The lacking ele- 

LACK OF LIBERTY ment he did not 

supply w'as liber¬ 
ty. At least the 
men thought so. They w’ere affected as if 
their liberty were curtailed. They could not 
own their houses. It is not often that a 
workman does own his house. He is usually 
a renter. But elsewhere he knows that he 
can own a home if ever he gets money enough, 
w'hile at Pullman he knew that he could 
not. He w'as, therefore, discontented with a 
lot far better than that of most men' who 
earned his W'age. 

■When Mr. Pullman, a clerk in a country 
store, had saved $50 he started out in life for 
himself. He got ahead rapidly because he 
gave to the world something it had long 
wanted, and something it would want still 
more as railroads increased and long jour¬ 
neys became more necessary. We have seen 
at the big fairs the first type of his sleeping 
car—a barn like structure with three tiers 
of bunks on each side, a pancake mattress 


and the landscape gardener, and he also called 
upon the preacher and the school teacher, and 
he hoped and believed that he was doing a 
good thing. The world, that took an interest 
in the experiment, believed so. Krupp, the 
gunmaker, had done something like it in Es¬ 
sen, Germany; M. Colin had made a model 
village at Guise, France; there was another at 
Portlaw, Ireland, founded by Malcolmson, and 
best known of all was Saltaire, created by 
Titus Salt, a maker of alpaca in England. 

Yet the Pullman ex- 

PULLMAN WAS periment was some¬ 
what different from 
the others, in that 
the owners of the new town did not assume 
the paternal attitude toward their men that 
may be seen in some of the European manu¬ 
facturing settlements. Mr. Salt, for instance, 
W'as distinctly paternal in his intentions. He 
mixed with his people in their merry-makings, 
w’hich Mr. Pullman seldom did; he encouraged 
a flower society and opened a gymnasium, in¬ 
firmary, club rooms and the like; he provided 
an almshouse wherein his old employes could 
end their days in peace, without the wretched 
environment common to asylums for the poor. 


NOT PATERNAL 


























24 


THE PALACE CAR TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


When a band of music was felt to be a neces- 
alty he paid for it. His men came to look 
upon him as an almsgiver and a pro¬ 
tector. 

Mr. Pullman felt that this attitude of the em¬ 
ployer toward the employed savored too much 
of charity. He wanted his men to prosper, 
but he wanted them to prosper through their 
own thrift and Industry. When they went to 
him and suggested that a brass band would 
add to the gayety of the town he coincided 
with their views, but when they asked him to 
buy the instruments he demurred, on princi¬ 
ple. He showed them how a fund could be 
borrowed on easy terms, how the band could 
•arn the money to pay it back by playing for 


this reserve on their part is not so marked, 
but the scarcity of beer is a sorrow. 

ruicc cniiRcc 

unltr oUUnOC trouble in Pullman, 

OF TROUBLE. 

been trouble, has been 
the ownership of the land and the refusal to 
sell to the people who lived upon it. But the' 
company—or Mr. Pullman, who was most of 
the company—gave reasons for this ac¬ 
tion. It said that if it sold to an employe of 
the company, he in turn might sell to some 
outsider, who would set up a nuisance, who 
would neglect the trees and lawns and flower 
beds, which are now cared for entirely by the 



concerts and dances, and the men themselves 
in a little while allowed that this view was the 
right one. They borrowed the money and 
paid it back honorably, and they felt then that 
they owned their horns and trombones and 
were beholden to nobody but themselves for 
such pleasure as they derived from the 
music. 

When he started a library for the use of the 
people he gave the rooms and 6,000 books, 
but he thought it best for the men them¬ 
selves that they should do something toward 
Its support. So there is a charge of 25 cents 
a month, except for the use of the reading 
rooms, the magazines and papers being free to 
all. Twenty-five cents a month is not a 
hardship, yet there were men who grum¬ 
ble at it, aud say that the books 

should have been absolutely free. They 

would have been, had they raised a fund large 
enough to make them so, as the people of 
Boston have done, and as they have done in 
scores of villages in New England. And 
one must not forget the town of Chi¬ 
cago, to be sure. Beggary in any form 
was not tolerated, and saloons, brothels 
and gaming houses were strictly taboo. 

Liquor was and is sold at a little bar in 
the hotel, but this was an accommodation 
for visitors who were called to Pullman on 
business, and while there was a tacit under- 
•tanding that the men were not to assemble 
there, or at least, not to hang around the 
place, it was too high priced anyhow, and 
they staid away. Since Mr. Pullman’s death 


company, without trouble or expense to the 
tenants, and thus destroy the beauty and har¬ 
mony of the place. Or, worse, the buyer 
might engage in some offensive business, or 
he might, start a low class groggery which 
would become a resort for loafers, a scandal 
to the neighborhood, a school of vice. Only 
by controlling the property absolutely could 
such objectionable features be kept out. The 
shops which supply the populace with meat, 
groceries, drugs, tobacco, books and other 
necessities, are run by men who rent their 
premises precisely as the others do, and there 
is no relation whatever between them and the 
company other than that of the usual tenant 
and landlord. The company has never owned 
a store, has never paid its men in grocery or¬ 
ders, has never Intimated that it would like 
certain merchants to be patronized. Trade 
was as free as religion or education, and to 
neither of these is there the slightest bar, 
except in the rent of a church edifice; rather, 
there is reasonable help. 

In order to keep the town as neat as pos¬ 
sible the renters who owned horses were 
obliged to keep them in a general stable, in¬ 
stead of in such individual barns and stables 
as they might otherwise undertake to erect. 
This prevented the existence of nuisances 
near the dwellings. Excellent drainage was 
established, which dried and purified the 
ground, and the waste of the town was sensi- i 
bly turned to account as fertilizer and used ■ 
on farms. Running water, gas and steam heat j 
were supplied to every house, gas and electric 
light were supplied from gas and electric 
plants on the premises, and every house had 
sanitary plumbing. Parks, tennis courts and 


playgrounds were laid off, shade trees and 
gardens were planted, good roads were laid, 
and in fact so much money was spent on the 
town that it is claimed that the returns in 
rentals never exceeded 414 per cent, and were 
as low as 314. The employes, or, rather, their 
friends outside, allege that the amount is far 
in excess of this. A good many frantic state¬ 
ments of both sorts have been made about 
Pullman. 

As a matter of fact, 

RENTS L0W> the rents are low, 

COMPARATI VELY/“gT f^^e^ 

money, and now that Pullman has become a 
part of Chicago the rents remain the same, 
although the company’s taxes and expenses 
will probably be increased. It will doubtless 
cost it several thousand dollars to finish the 
street now in process of construction through 
the park before the works—a proceeding that 
Mr. Pullman him.self would have viewed with 
severe displeasure, for his park was a source 
of pride to him. 

Other changes will follow, for the courts 
have decided that the Pullman company has 
no right to own real estate, to build or rent 
houses, to light or warm them, or to do any¬ 
thing except build cars. This ruling may bo 
circumvented by the resignation of the old 
charter and the taking out of a new one, in 
which such things will be possible; or, if 
compelled to sell its real estate within the 
prescribed five years, a company can be 
formed within the company to buy and oper¬ 
ate the town. 

It is a mistaken idea that Pullman was a 
town by Itself. It has never had a corporate 
existence. It was originally a part of the 
town of Hyde Park, a little more built up 
than other parts, represented in its village 
councils by elected delegates, and compacted 
around the works for mere convenience 
sake. Nor is it true that the men of the 
works were so soured against the Pullman 
company by the strike that they voted to 
annex themselves to Chicago. The annexing 
to that sinful city was accomplished by a 
vote of the whole of. Hyde Park, which neces¬ 
sarily dragged Pullman along with it. The 
residents of Pullman Itself voted against an¬ 
nexation five to one. As there were only 
10,000 people in the part of Hyde Park called 
Pullman—there never was any such place, 
geographically—they were overruled. In a 
few years the station now called Pullman 
will simply mark One Hundred and Eleventh 
street, Chicago. 

As much of the interest of Pullman is late 
history, it may be well to briefly re-state the 
events that made it the most talked about 
place in America half a dozen years ago. It 
was when times were at their worst. Shops 
were closing everywhere; men were out of 
employment; money was hard to get; people 
did not pay their bills; hence employers could 
not pay their men as well as they had been 
doing. The Pullman company had suffered 
along with others. It was fulfilling some con¬ 
tracts at a loss. As is now known. Mr. Pull¬ 
man was at times pressed for money, and on 
occasion borrowed so largely as a million of 
dollars. After conference with his superin¬ 
tendents and bosses he decided not to shut 
down, but to reduce the w'orking capacity of 
his shops and reduce wages, as the other em¬ 
ployers had done This was resented and a 
committee of the men went to the office to 
protest. Instancing as a reason for the restor¬ 
ation of wages to the ‘‘good times” scale, 
the keeping up of rentals and gas and water 
rates. The men say they were charged over 
32 a thousand feet for gas, and the company 
says $1.70, while the Chicago price was Jl.lO, 
and it was awful stuff at any price. The 






















































THE PALACE CAR TRUST AXD ITS EMPLOYES. 


25 


men say that the gas could be made 
for 33 cents a thousand, and the company 
had other views. Chicago gas lately in¬ 
troduced into the neighborhood is said to be 
less in pressure and altogether inferior. The 
water was 4 cents a thousand gallons, said 
to be the cost price for pumping. The men 
say that the cost was but a cent a thousand 
and that the water came through the city 
mains. 


BEGINNING OF 
PULLMAN’S WOES. 


In answering the 
claims of this del¬ 
egation, Mr. Pull¬ 
man said that 
nothing could be done until times Improved, 
and shortly after three members of the com¬ 
mittee were laid off. This was held by some 
to be a punishment for daring to beard the 
capitalist, and by others to be a rebuke to a 
Democratic vote In the town, and there was 
a great to-do. If outsiders had kept away the 
chances are that the business would have 
gone right along and the men would have 
shaped their way of living to a reduced wage; 
but the element that keeps Chicago awake 
when it wants to sleep, the element that 
holds socialistic meetings in one corner of 
the town and throws anarchist bombs in 
another, made it Its immediate business to 
Interfere and rouse the men to mischief. One 
of the oldest employes in the works, who 
shakes his head regretfully over this episode, 
says: “I believe if the old Corliss engine had 
just kept right on the men would have come 
straggling in again, a few days after the strike 
was declared, but when the gates shut against 
them they lost their temper.” 


The men struck at the suggestion of the 
disturbers, and the disturbers roused as many 
of the labor unions as possible to support the 
strike. They tried to persuade barbers and 
roustabouts to quit work. The whole city and 
its environs were affected. Seeing only 
that things were wrong, hoping in a mad, 
blind way to right them, heated and goaded 
by the oratory of Debs and Sovereign, the 
workers, aided by looting camp followers, 
took control and made a reign of terror in 
parts of Chicago. Trains were blocked, then 
burned; business was brought to a stand¬ 
still; cattle nearly died on the trains for lack 
of food and water; passengers trying to enter 
the city on stalled trains were not allowed 
to obtain water for drinking, because the 
unions had ordered away the men whose 
duty it was to fill the tanks, and for any¬ 
one else to carry water to the cars would have 
been to defy the unions; thousands of cars 
were wrecked, with their contents; perishable 
freight was not only an immediate loss, but in¬ 
volved the railroad companies for years after 
In suits; it is said that one company paid to 
one fruit farmer $25,000 in compromise of his 
claim. The wages lost by the Pullman hands 
alone during the strike were not far from 
$600,000, and the whole bill of wreckage, burn¬ 
ing, spoiling and lost wages has been reck¬ 
oned as high as $80,000,000. When the strik¬ 
ers became rioters and obstructed the govern¬ 
ment mails, the Federal authorities, finding 
the state and city weak and disposed to trim 
to the insurgents, sent troops of regulars to 
the scene and the disturbance ended. 


AGITATORS URGED 
STRIKERS ON. 


In all this Mr. 
Pullman resisted 
appeals, demands, 
advice and threats. 
He said he had nothing to arbitrate, that he 
was running his own business and^he would 
not recognize Debs or Sovereign or their lieu¬ 
tenants as having authority. Labor began to 
be hungry. The country sympathized with 
it and reviled the name of Pullman. Meet¬ 
ings were held on the prairie opposite the 
ehops, at which professional agitators tried 


to rouse the strikers to murder. One 
of these orators in his speech cried: 
“Yonder are the shops. Who built 
them? You, my friends. They are the re¬ 
sult of your labor.” A cynic who heard this 
address remarked afterw'ard: "There wasn't 
one in the whole crowd that had been there 
when the works started, but they yelled just 
the same as if they believed him.” 

When the strike had been on for a few 
weeks the men of the car shops began to suf¬ 
fer. It is said that some of them experi¬ 
enced the actual pangs of hunger. That fhose 
who were boarding bilked their landladies 
is not surprising, for they had no money to 
pay, and landladies are, as everyone knows, 
overflowing with sympathy and unable to 
turn away a veteran mealer. Presently, a 
relief fund was started, and food, coal and 
medicines were distributed to the strikers. 
They did not inquire from what or whom 
this charity came. The claim is made much 
of it came from George M. Pullman, whom 
they were reviling every night in their meet¬ 
ings, but an enemy of this magnate, J. P. 
Hopkins, is known to have been a contrib- 
u*^or. Some of the men were allowed 
to live right along in the company’s tene¬ 
ments without paying rent, the first per¬ 
sons ejected for non-payment being three or 


that there will be no general strike again, 
for the men remember the last one too clear¬ 
ly. They keep up their labor unions, but 
they survive as forms, rather than influences, 
and do not affect more than half of the men, 
if so many. The death of Mr. Pullman also 
—attributed in part to what he was forced 
to endure in obloquy and disappointment 
—has more than possibly tranquilized the 
men, not a few of whom persisted in re¬ 
garding him as their personal enemy. As 
one of them put it: “I guess the old man’s 
dying kind of smoothed things over. I don’t 
think the men have any kick now.” 

DErOrMXRS t-MX 

RESENTMENT feeling engendered 

by the strike that to 
this day it Is diffi¬ 
cult, if not impossible, to get at the truth of 
many of the statements, and impossible to 
reconcile some of the factionists to the con¬ 
duct of the company in locking out the strik¬ 
ers. Even the government commission that 
was absurdly appointed to draw $10 a day 
a man to inquire why Mr. 'Pullman reduced 
wages of men who did a good deal more for 
their money, brought out no fact that the 
newspapers had not given to the public, and 
contented itself with intimating that the 
way out of the trounle would have been for 


STILL RANKLES. 



THE GRAMMAR SCHOOL AT PULLMAN. 


four professional disturbers whose presence and 
example in the community were bad. Some of 
these men are still in arrears, and only a few 
days ago one of the bitterest of the strikers 
presented himself for a job, despite the fact 
that ho was in debt to the company. And ex¬ 
cepting five men, every survivor of the 
strike of 1894, who has asked for w'ork. Is 
back at his place in the shops. There are 
many of the employes who insist that they 
were turned out promptly when they failed 
in their rent. 

To say that there is no discontent at pres¬ 
ent would be to say that there are no human 
beings in Pullman, for discontent is one of 
the privileges of the race; but it is believed ' 


the company to raise wages or go out of 
business. It is still insisted by some of th» 
men that the town is too paternal for a free 
citizen; that a renter is under the eye of the 
company and has to walk with undue straight¬ 
ness; that spies are engaged to watch him 
and report his conduct at headquarters; that 
he has no voice In his own government. 

This is so and is not so. The company will 
not rent one of its houses or flats to a man 
who is notoriously dirty, or who gets drunk, 
or who wastes his money. Moreover, it keeps 
watch enough over its employes to urge them 
to send their children to the excellent school* 

' of the place—where Mr. Pullman sent his own 












































20 


THE PALACE CAR TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


children—and encourages the young men ol 
ambition to attend night school, as many 
of them'do—250 in fact, beside some foreign 
adults, thus adding to the regular school at¬ 
tendance of 1,400 boys and girls. It is pa¬ 
ternal enough, the company is, to pay the 
deficit when a play at the theater fails to 
draw, to contribute to the churches, for the 
principal one of which it exacts $300 a mouth 
rent, however; to keep all lawns, parks, gar¬ 
dens and borders in condition, to remove gar¬ 
bage, to water streets, and the foundation for 
the statement that it employs spies is seen 
In the reports and interferences of janitors 
and other agents chiefly as to the cleanliness 
and sanitary condition of the houses. 

The effort is made to keep the population 
clean. This is not merely that-the people 
may respect themselves and be the better 
qualifled to mingle together at plays and 
concerts, but that diseases may be kept out 
of the place. It is said, however, that the 
task is difficult in some parts of Pullman. It 


the streets of Putman and it is for the courts 
rather than for the company to punish many 
of the offenses. 


HIGH AVERAGE 
FOR WAGES. 


Pullman Is an inci¬ 
dent. The car works 
are the cause of it. 
The immense shops 
divide the town and make the larger part of 
it. What these shops stand for is expressed 
in a few figures; They use up every year 
about 52,000,000 feet of lumber and 85,000 tons 
of iron; they can put out in a twelvemonth 
between 12,000 and 13,000 freight cars, 313 
sleepers, over 600 passenger coaches and a 
thousand street cars; a train in themselves 
that would reach nearly from New York to 
Hartford; the cars operated by the company 
after they leave the shops cover nearly 200,- 
000,000 miles a year; there are washed an¬ 
nually in the great laundry here—^the largest 
in the world—about 34,000,000 pieces, the din¬ 
ing and buffet cars serve every year nearly 
5,000,000 meals and between five and six 


rounded by a wall, with an iron fence atop of 
it—one consequence of the labor troubles— 
which is pierced at certain Intervals by gates. 
These gates have turnstiles over which watch* 
men preside; and as each workman enters at 
a gate bearing his initial, he takes a billet 
stamped with his number, which he deposits 
in a rack in his particular room of his par¬ 
ticular shop when he reaches it. In this way 
it is easy to “keep tab” on the men, though 
every department has its timekeeper as well. 
In one shed, over a quarter of a mile long, 
one may see the evolution of rough w'ood into 
completed freight cars, the wood tumbling in 
at once end, raw, fragrant, and leaving at the 
other on rails, smelling of new paint. Sixty 
cars a day can be made here. The men in all 
the shops are doing more and more work by 
the piece and in this department four men 
build a car. They are spry about it, and in 
order to waste no time the nailing of the 
floors is done with a sledge hammer that will 
knock them into place at the first tap. A 



Is lightened In a measure from the blending 
of nationalities. In a town that keeps a 
waiting list of renters a new tenant is put in 
as soon as there is a vacancy for him. This 
throws the Italian into the same building 
as the Irishman, and he has an East Indian 
for his right hand neighbor and a Polack 
on his left. At first there was more or less 
fighting, in consequence of this mixture, but 
there is little of it now, for it is cause of 
Immediate discharge. Drunkenness is not 
common and if the offender is not a hardened 
one he may hope for mercy if he absents 
himself unexpectedly once in a while. Two 
men were found under the Influence of al¬ 
cohol that had been bought for varnish and 
although one of them was discharged, the 
other escaped with a reprimand. The girls 
In the shops are treated with uniform con¬ 
sideration. The Chicago police now patrol 


million people travel every year on Pullman 
sleepers and parlor cars. The daily wage bill 
of the Pullman Company is $30,000, and the 
average wage in the shops, including boys 
and women, is $2.26. 

The shops, substantially built of brick and 
stone, contain more kinds of Industry than 
will be found together in a single congeries 
of factories in any other place, unless it may 
be in the General Electric Works in Schenec¬ 
tady. Not only are cars made here, but the 
fitments for the cars, at least, most of them; 
the ornamental brass castings for the plat¬ 
forms; the table silver for the dining cars; 
the curtains, pillows, mattresses, and so on 
for the sleepers; the mirrors for the dining and 
sleeping cars; the marquetry work that deco¬ 
rates the fronts of the bunks; the bowls for 
the wash rooms; the trucks, axles and wheels 
on which the cars travel; the door knobs, 
latches and cuspidors. The shops are sur- 


VUC VI LUCBV 


Wlli ue IC/UIia lO QO 
days, of course. 

WORK SLOW 

AND CAREFUL cars are put together 

are smaller and the 
work is far more careful and slow. The rough 
shanties that you see in construction do not 
look in the least like the finished cars that are 
presently run into the yards upon trucks and 
dragged sidelong by a yard engine to another 
stall, over some part of the 62 miles of rall- 
rokd that are operated in the shops and town. 
The drying kilns make a respectable factory, 
regarded simply for their size, and in the lum¬ 
ber yard one may see a million dollars’ worth 
of boards and timbers heaped at once, and 
this does not include mahogany and the 
rarer woods, either. In saw mills and turn¬ 
ing shops, odorous as the woods, the shaping 
la done by busy hundreds under netted elec- 













































THE PALACE CAR TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


27 


trie lights, and the machinery Is arranged In 
such an order that the boards and other pieces 
pass from one to another without lifting, thus 
saving space, time and strength. 

Here is an embossing machine that stamps 
designs like bead work, for ceiling borders 
and bunks; there are the carving machines 
that enable a man, tracing a relief pattern 
with a point, to reproduce the ornamental 
form he is following, on pieces at his right 
and left, the principle on which they operate 
being a combination of the hektograph and 
dentist’s drill; another lathe cuts twists on 
rope patterns for doors or window edges. The 
inside linings for the decks or raised portions 
of the roof are pieced together from thin 
sheets of wood, glued and pressed Into the 
deck form in great iron molds that hold 
them clinched for six hours. Next we see 
carvers finishing by hand the work more 
roughly done by machines, and others putting 
together the bunk covers, beautifully traced 
ever with marquetry. 

This marquetry looks like a result of pain¬ 
fully slow hand labor, but as a matter of fact 


is then removed, the whole smoothed and 
glued to the bunk cover and the job is done. 
Some of the raised work on these covers 
is too delicate or too fiorid for carving, so it 
is made in composition and' stained to re¬ 
semble wood, the composition being the same 
mixture of whiting, glue and rosin that is 
used for picture frames. Tulip, mahogany, 
cocoa, vermilion and tiger are the woods most 
commonly used for parlor car interiors. 

Visitors to the world 

WORKMEN HAVE fair win remember 

NEAT HABITS. 

hinations of these woods with silver, brass, 
onyx and harmoniously colored fabrics, 
and it is claimed, with seeming reason, 
that the provision of handsome cars for the 
public makes the public behave more hand¬ 
somely while in them than it will in ordinary 
cars, or in some of its homes. At all events 
you seldom see a man of any sort spitting on 
the floor of a sleeper. Visitors to that earlier 
fair In Philadelphia find here one of the most 
interesting relics of that enterprise In the 


a hammer endures its work sometimes for a 
month. After the axle is finished it is put 
under a pile driver and a weight is allowed 
to fall on it. If the axle bends it is thrown 
out as defective. The lathes finish the round¬ 
ing of the piece and the car wheels are pressed 
on by hydraulic rams. Overhead switches 
carry weights and implements to any part of 
the shops, reaching out like so many threads 
In a spider’s web. The trucks are assembled 
in a separate shed and the castings, both of 
iron and brass, are made in the usual foun¬ 
dries. 

Next we come to the shops where the 
cushions are cleaned by blasts of compressed 
air—a process they are put through every 
trip—beside the ripping apart, washing, dye¬ 
ing and re-stuffing that happens every thre* 
months. The laundry, in which several hun¬ 
dred girls are employed, is in town, but a 
hundred or so of young women are en¬ 
gaged here in sewing quilts, blankets, sheets, 
pillow cases, curtains or piecing upholstery 
and carpets. 

In the finishing shops, pervaded by an odor 



it is greatly facilitated by machines, for the 
thin veneers in which it is set are pierced 
in the desired patterns by fretsaws hardly 
larger than shad bones, which are also made 
on the premises, and a dozen sheets of wood 
are cut at a time, for the veneer is often but 
a twentieth of an inch in thickness. 

So with the white or tinted pieces that are 
to be set in, to make the pattern; they are 
sawed In bunches of twenty or so, following 
the pattern set before them by an artist-arti¬ 
san, and the shading that you see on the 
edges of leaves is made by the simple device 
of scorching the pieces slightly by immersion 
in hot sand. After the pieces are put into 
place in the corresponding hollows of the 
veneer a sheet of paper is pasted over the 
front so as to keep them in place while the 
under side is puttied, the putty filling the 
little cracks, hollows and thready lines that 
are cut to represent leaf veins. The paper 


2,500 horse power engine that drove the me¬ 
chanism in machinery hall, for this supplies 
the principal power to the Pullman works, 
and the steam for it comes from a battery of 
twelve boilers. It is a splendid creature of 
steel. 

The machine shops are the usual things, 
only more of them, and in the blacksmithlng 
department the sons of Tubal smite with 
brawny arms the glowing metal, pulling it 
from furnaces fed by oil and blown by com¬ 
pressed air. Multiply the village smithy 250 
times and you have the effect of this shop. 
Then there is the still noisier hammer shop 
where plates and bars are beaten into stand¬ 
ard forms, some of the hammers, that would 
crack a house at a stroke, pounding the axles 
for freight cars into shape, at first with pon¬ 
derous whacks, and, as the axle assumes its 
proper rounding, with delicate, trimming taps. 
The big oak timber that forms the handle of 


as of a ton of bananas, which comes from 
the brass lacquer, the metal pieces are fin¬ 
ished; the knobs, locks, racks and other pieces 
polished until they dazzle; the spoons, 
knives, pepper and salt boxes, cream Jugs and 
salvers plated and burnished; the oil lamp* 
and Pintsch gas lighters cleaned and reno¬ 
vated, the wash bowls stamped out of white 
metal In a press, the closets, ice tanks and 
other accessories put together. In the tall, 
strong tower that stands hack of the oflBcee 
and is a landmark seen for miles across the 
fiat, environing country, is a water tank 
that would flood the neighborhood if It were 
to break, which it doesn’t. It reminds One of 
such constructions ae the keeps and donjons 
of the old world castles, but it is entirely 
peaceful in its origin, and its lower stories 
a.re now occupied by the glass department* 
of the car company. 

Here “gothics” of opalescent glass edged 






















































28 


THE PALACE CAR TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


with yellow “jewels” are pieced together in 
brass settings, after original designs made in 
the drafting rooms, and are ready to be placed 
at the deck endcs and over doors and arched 
windows. Here the “bloom” Is placed on 
glass which It is desired to leave transparent, 
yet impossible to see through. Glass that Is 
"bloomed” has the effect of being covered 
with rain drops, and the way they do this Is 
to daub the pane with glue and let it dry. As 
the glue scales off it pulls little flakes of 
glass with it—so easy that you wonder how 
you never happened to think of it. Perhaps 
It is because you prefer your glass un¬ 
bloomed. Here also you may see etching, by 
hydrofluoric acid, and here mirrors are made, 
the plates being laid on hot tables and the 
secret solution, which we only know contains 
silver, poured upon them. In twenty minutes 
the silver has crystallized and your mirror is 
ready to reflect your own seraphic features. 
Old mirrors, on which bridal couples traveling 
to Niagara Falls have inscribed their initials 
with the bride’s diamond ring, are also sent 
here and the scratches are taken out, as they 
are out of plate glass windows, by bufflng. 


Pullman laid off for them to run and leap 
and play ball, or In summer to row over the 
course on the lake, and hundreds of them 
going to town to attend the matinees, or to 
do shopping, or to meet acquaintances. 
Strange as it may seem, this halt holiday was 
desired hy many of the men, because it gave 
them a chance to rest for church on Sunday. 
Though not painfully religious as a body, 
they represent the principal creeds, and there 
are some pretty little churches in Pullman, in 
which the Protestants meet for worship, as 
well as halls in which the smaller sects con¬ 
gregate. The Catholic Church stands just 
outside of Pullman, because it was erected 
to accommodate the people, not of that town 
alone, but of Roseland, which lies half a mile 
or so away, across an open prairie. 

It is in these outlying towns of Roseland, 
Gano and Kensington that many of the bands 
own houses. Land is cheap, or was when they 
bought it, and it is also to these towns that 
other hands resort for the quenching of 
thirst. One of them used to be known as 
“Bumtown,” because of the number of saloons 


tionalities there is but a handful each. More 
than 4,000 of the workers are married and 
3,242 of the whole force live in Pullman with 
their families and servants. Nearly 4,000, 
therefore, live in the surrounding districts, 
where over 900 own homes. The average time 
in which the men have been employed in 
Pullman is 6’4 years. Of the whole body 250 
are rated as first class men, thoughtful, in¬ 
ventive, capable of giving advice and mak¬ 
ing discoveries; over 3,000 are classed as good 
mechanics, displaying dexterity in their 
work; a little over 2,000 are called fair work¬ 
men and the rest are people whose work any¬ 
body could do. 

The houses in which these people live are 
mostly of a sad colored brick, formerly made 
by the company in its own clay fields. They 
have no fences in front, but their back yards 
are usually separated. They are commonly two 
story houses built in rows, but three story 
houses are not uncommon, especially in the 
streets devoted to flats. Outside they pre¬ 
sent an appearance so attractive that in any 
other town they would be taken as the homes 



Glass of requisite thickness is also beveled 
here on a series of wheels, the first charged 
with sand, the next of iron covered with 
emery, then one of wood and finally one cov¬ 
ered with felt, reddened with rouge. 

This is a mere glance at the many indus¬ 
tries of the place, for a study of them would 
fill one’s time for weeks and months, and is a 
thing not lightly to be undertaken, even if 
the company were willing, which it does not 
appear to be, lor there are signs up in the 
office, informing visitors that they are posi¬ 
tively not to be admitted. 

_ The hours in the 

HOW MEN SPEND Pullman shops aver- 

THEIR LEISURE. ^ 

work begins at 6:30 
in the morning and lasts till 6 at night, with 
forty-five minutes for dinner at noon. To 
offset this, the shops shut down at the end of 
the morning’s work on Saturday and the 
men—whose choice this is—have a hall holi¬ 
day. This leisure they use variously, some 
going to the library, some getting drunk, 
some sleeping or Idling or jobbing at home, 
many of the Swedes going to church meet¬ 
ings, some going into the grounds that Mr. 


it supported and the number of people who 
were to be seen there of a pleasant evening 
under the Influence. It does not appear 
that the men of one nationality drink much 
more than their associates of others. Nor 
has the character of the men in respect of 
nationality changed perceptibly in the last 
five years. The raid of the modern Goths and 
Vandals is not strenuous enough to justify 
the lament of one of the workens that “the 
Americans are being driven out here, just 
like the Indians were. It’s partly their own 
fault,” he added, “for they won’t raise big 
families, and these duffers that come here 
from Italy and Ireland and Greece and all 
them places, they just breed like rabbits.” 


AMERICANS 
PREDOMINATE. 


There were over 7,000 
men at work here in Oc¬ 
tober, when the local 
census of the shops was 
taken, and of these nearly 3,000 were Amer¬ 
icans. The Scandinavians came next, with 
nearly 1,500, the Germans with 714. British 
with 817, Latins only 146, Hollanders—not of 
the highest class, for most of them are la¬ 
borers—616; Poles, 114, and the once domi¬ 
nant Irishman has barely 200. Of other na- 


of shop keepers, and young professional men, 
especially in summer, when the shade trees 
are green and the flowers are in bloom. It 
somewhat destroys the Illusion, however, 
when you find in the rather small dining 
rooms pertaining to these dwellings a half 
dozen husky looking Poles or Huns with 
their coats off, eagerly shoveling cabbage 
and salt beef into their mouths and hoping 
for time to smoke their pipes and have a chat 
at the gates before the afternoon whistle 
blows. For many of these men are boarders 
and are stowed somewhere about the prem¬ 
ises of the renters. There are evil odors in 
some of the homes and there has been some 
complaint of insufficient and imperfect plumb¬ 
ing. 


HOUSES ARE 
DISAPPOINTING. 


Inside the houses are 
a trifle disappointing, 
not because they are 
not better than work¬ 
ingmen’s houses in the average, but because 
they are old fashioned. They have low 
base boards, for Instance, Instead of the 
cleanly and substantial looking wainscot; the 
floors are not of hard wood; the wall paper 
is various in respect of taste, when there i» 











































THE PALACE CAR TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


29 


paper; the windows are narrow, and the 
rooms are small. But one is not to expect 
palaces when the rent is considered. These 
houses bring on an average $11.63 a month, 
and when you come to flats there are about 
eighty that rent for less than $5 each. There 
Is one house In the town that brings $77.25 
a month and in the arlstocratil section, 
where the bosses and superintendents live, 
or where physicians and other outsiders have 
taken domicile, rents range from $30 to $70. 
In 963 homes the rental does not exceed $10, 
and' in more than 1,400 homes its average is 
$9 a month. The entire number of rooms in 
the colony is. In round numbers, 9,000. 

In addition to the residences Pullman has 
a neat ^tel, managed by the company, in 
which some of the bachelors of the clerical 
force reside, and it has a glass rooted mar¬ 
ket, a picturesque stable, schools, club house 
and arcade. The arcade, a short street under 
glass, contains most of the shops, which are 
well stocked, as well as the theater and the 
bank. This bank contains nearly $1,000,000 In 
deposits and that represents about $300 each 
for the 3,500 depositors, who draw 3 per cent, 
on their money. There has been a steady in¬ 
crease in the number and savings of depos¬ 
itors. though as a consequence of the strike 
the bank was nearly empty six years ago. 
As some mechanics make $5 a day and $3 
a day is a common wage, even the laborers 
making $1.50, with time and a half for over 
time, which they are glad to get, and as rents 
are low and temptations distant, there is no 
reason why the bank should not be solvent. 

If Mr. Pullman was soured and disappoint¬ 
ed by the failure of his men'^to'agree with 
him, he was not alone in that disappointment. 
There are friends who helped him in the es¬ 
tablishment of these shops who have not re¬ 
covered from the strike, and can not speak of 
it without a tone of pessimism and bitterness. 
Nor is the surprise all'on their part, either. 
Some of the men -w'ho threw themselves out 
of work have been slow to make friends with 
their old associates. At a recent meeting of 
a labor union one of them boldly demanded 
that somebody should tell him what unions 
bad ever done for him. “They Just lost m« 


my job; that’s all,” he grunted. And they 
wanted to throw him out of the window. 
But, of course, there are hundreds who have 
never forgiven Mr. Pullman, and never will, 
and who say that his lock-out was merely a 
punishment of his hands that had voted for 
Cleveland. 

m /N r>. ...... . ^ personal friend of 

CALLS PULLMAN Mr. Pullman puts the 

A GREAT MAN. 

ble in the past and 
the misunderstanding and discontent of 
some of the employes in the present entirely 
on the men. "‘Mr. Pullman,” said he, “was a 
great man. Some day it will be conceded that 
he was. He had hit upon a good idea. True, 
the Almighty had invented sleep and nobody 
else had attempted to take out a patent on it, 
but Pullman was the man who made sleep pos¬ 
sible on a railroad train, and that means a 
good deal in these times. Why, one of the 
Standard Oil men told me a while ago that 
he had spent 246 nights on a car last year. 
Imagine it without a Pullman sleeper! Pull¬ 
man believed—he knew—he was doing a good 
thing in furnishing these people with homes 
such as they could not get anywhere else. 
People laughed at him for doing it, 
but he went right straight ahead and did 
It. The Austrian commission that was 
here a while ago, and that had been all over 
the world preparing its report on the housing 
of the laboring classes reported on Pullman as 
the nearest to the ideal that the world had yet 
afforded. And it has had its effect on other 
places, too. In this short space of years. It 
marks an era. The making of sleeping cars 
doubled comfort and therefore Increased health 
and lengthened life, and the building of these 
homes for the builders of .the cars Is a step 
In a reform. But the people don’t care. They 
have planted grass for them, and they walk 
on it. They have planted flowers, and their 
children sneak out at night and break them. 
I told George M. more than once that it was 
of no use appealing to their higher Instincts, 
for they hadn’t any; that they would be will¬ 
ing to break his head with a coupling pin lor 
25 cents. They’re just Indians. They never 
think. The fellow that puts heads on bolts, 
in there, doesn't know any more about the 


rights and reflnements of life than your house 
cat knows about my hymn book. Oh, yes, I 
have to concede that the place has some ef¬ 
fect on them. They would probably act worse 
if they hadn’t these surroundings. Better 
conditions make better men. As to these fel¬ 
lows owning homes in Pullman that never 
was a cause oi grievance. Very few of them 
ever -n’anted to. If they had, I think Mr. 
Pullman would have sold to them. As it was, 
they were encouraged to own homes any¬ 
where around here. Naturally he wanted to 
know what sort of a tenant he was getting, 
for he did not want men here who did not in¬ 
tend to stay or who were not sober. When 
the shops closed he was running them at a 
loss. He had lost money before and I know 
it. He could no more flx the rate of wages 
for certain lines of work than he could flx the 
rate_^ for meat or milk. Supply and demand 
regplate all that, and he paid the best wages 
that were paid in any of the car shops. But, 
as I said. What’s the use? These Indians 
didn’t appreciate it.” 

Whether these matters stand as they did 
before the strike or not, a visitor would not 
attempt to say, but truth compels the asser¬ 
tion that the men as a class appear to be 
cheerful and content; their wives are comfort¬ 
able in appearance: their children are hearty, 
healthy looking youngsters, as well dressed as 
one will see anywhere and somewhat better 
than the average. Socialism is not making 
any head. It is never talked except in a club 
of Germans, which has fifty members, and is 
not addicted to vehemence. The intelligence 
of the workers is certainly up to a good aver¬ 
age, judging by school standards, yet the 
library languishes, and hardly pays expenses. 
Its 8,000 books are weeded every year of de¬ 
crepit volumes and new purchases put in, the 
old ones bestowed on any charity that will 
take them; but only 10 per cent, of the men 
use it. Their children, however, go there of¬ 
ten and the best hopes of this social experi¬ 
ment may survive or be advanced when they 
reach maturity. There is a feeling that insti¬ 
tutionalism is rapidly succeeding individual¬ 
ism. If so, the history and status of Pullman 
should be studied before society take* any 
steps which it can not retrace. 













THE PAPER TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES 


A rage tor the classic, that we Inherited 
architecturally from Christopher Wren, and 
that even now requires colonial houses In 
Hoboken and Kalamazoo to wear Doric col¬ 
umns on their fronts, also affected some of 
the names In the good State of New York. 
Hence we have mixed with Jonesburgs and 
Smithvilles and Jayson’s Corners such reson¬ 
ant and suggestive names as Rome, Troy. 
Utica, Ithaca, Athens, Elmira, Illon, Syracuse. 
Strangers who come here ask why we are not 
content with flowing Indian names like Schu- 
nemunk, Skaneateles, Speonk and Schenec¬ 
tady, which we found on the premises, and 
there Is no answer, except a reference to that 


submit to be led into one of their stages and 
jounced away to the village, a mile or two 
eastward, over a road that probably causes a 
good deal of vice and crime in the township. 

Corinth is known as the place of a paper 
mill. The mill is in Palmer. There is no 
difference. You pass from one to the other 
settlement without a jar, unless you are rid¬ 
ing, and a ride is all jars. For a mile the 
road is lined with one and a half story and 
two story dwellings of wood, usually with 
some little affectation of ornament about 
them, nearly always with a veranda, and in¬ 
variably with a few yards of open ground be¬ 
tween them and the highway. These are 


Take some of the New England villages, for 
example, and there will be, as an intellectual 
center, a library of 8,000 or 10,000 volumes, 
not always raised by the people, to be sure, 
more often bequeathed by some well-to-do 
resident: but kept by a small annual tax. 

But Corinth has schools. Of its population 
of 2,500—a liberal estimate—600 are in school, 
and of this number 350 are in the advanced 
grades In the new and handsome high school 
building on a far viewing hill top. Eight or 
nine teachers are employed in this school, and 
it is pleasant to note the beginnings of a 
sense of taste and the proprieties in the 
maintenance of a large lawn, sloping from 



THE BIG PAPER MILL AT CORINTH, N. Y. 


universal human attribution of the fairest and 
most desirable to the most distant, in place 
and time. 

And especially, why should the name of 
Corinth be applied to the hardscrabble sort 
of place on the Hudson, between Saratoga and 
the Adlrondacks? Corinth suggests temples, 
theaters, schools, academic shades, statuary 
and an Acrocorinthos, but the New York Cor¬ 
inth resembles the Greek Corinth chiefly In 
being a place of residence. When the conduc¬ 
tor and brakeman put you off the train, 
struggling against your fate, you And your¬ 
self on the platform of a country station with 
never a house or shed in sight. Three or four 
ancients, however, are waiting for you with 
vehicles nearly as old as themselves, and you 


MAKERS HAVE NOT. 


where the paper makers live. Many of them 
are owned by the mechanics, and those who 
rent them pay from $5 to $15 a month only. 

11111*1- n*ni-n Corinth—accent 

WHAT PAPER the last syllable 

—is one of those 
places that are 
best described in negations. It has no vil¬ 
lage green, no reading room, no bank, no peo¬ 
ple’s institute, no ornamental society, no pub¬ 
lic interest, no improved roads, no monu¬ 
ments, no local pride, and not much history, 
except that it furnished more soldiers to the 
state than any other place of its size. 
In these respects it is neither better 
nor worse than a thousand similar towns, but 
there are smaller towns which are better off. 

V 


the schoolhouse to the road, and signs forbid¬ 
ding the natives to drive their wagons over 
the graveled walk. By the extension of a 
few of these measures Corinth could be made 
a pretty spot, for it stands in a valley of 
scenic beauty, just where the geologic im¬ 
pulse that created the Adirondacks left its 
mark in ledgy hills that rise 500 to 1000 
feet above the river before dying down to’the 
plains of Saratoga. The paper mill, that is 
the nucleus of the town, happened here be¬ 
cause of the falls. The Hudson is a hurry¬ 
ing current whitening over reefs of slate and 
Anally plunging into a ravine a hundred feet 
or so in depth. On a broad shelf of this gap 
the mills have been erected and thfe water 



























































THE PAPER TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


81 


power suffices for most of the work, though It 
is supplemented by steam. 

The Hudson here begins to feel the influ¬ 
ence of rains and droughts, the water rising 
in great force after a wet spell and showing 
large areas of its stony bed in a dry season. 

For a long way above 

CUTTING OFF and below the mills 

THF WnnnQ shores are strewn 

incwuuuo. with lumber. .-V dozen 

cords of it destined for the saw mills, 
lie stranded on the shallows, it packs 
in rafts above the dam, a small town 
could be built from what the high water has 
left along the banks. So here you have cause 
and effect, for the freshets and the droughts 
are largely results of deforestation about the 
river sources. As most people know, the 
Adirondacks have lost great areas of their 
timber. With no woods to knit the soil to¬ 
gether the earth becomes dry and is washed 
away by heavy rains. Many of the hills that 
until thirty or forty years ago were green 
to their summits are now bleak rocks that 
cannot hold the moisture of dews and show¬ 
ers, but precipitate it into the valleys as de¬ 
structive freshets. Then, when the dry season 
comes, there is no reserve of water, because 
the vegetation and the mold which constitute 
an immense sponge, have been destroyed.. 

Suppose the final destruction of the Adiron-, 
dack forests. It would mean the disappear¬ 
ance of all that water power which supplies 


and the price is nothing to what It was 
just after the war, tor in 1865 the cost 
was $32 a hundred. It is understood that the 
paper trust has acquired and is acquiring 
large areas of forest in which the spruce for¬ 
merly abounded, but it is no secret that quan¬ 
tities of the timber are imported from Canada. 
How can it be otherwise? This is but one 
mill, yet it has a capacity of 310 tons of paper 
every day, crushed and mixed by water wheels 
of 15,000 horse power. About half of this is 
newspaper; the other portion, coarser varieties 
used for bags and wrapping. Doubtless the 
other woods will one day be brought into sub¬ 
jection, too, but at present it is only the 
spruce that lends itself to the process and fur¬ 
nishes a sufficiently fine and pliant fiber, in 
the sulphite process. In the Southern fac¬ 
tories poplar is a substitute. The trust is 
anxious, however, and stands ready to do 
what it may to continue the growth of the 
trees. 


ii/MifM-rx asarksio approach the 

HOUSES AMONG works at Corinth you 

HEAPS OF LOGS. ^ mountain of logs 

about an eighth of a 
mile from the buildings, and foothills of other 
logs, stacked behind some of the residences. 
They are run into the mill on an Inclined rail¬ 
way, except what may be taken over from the 
main line by freight cars, for although Cor¬ 
inth has no passenger service, the populace 
bouncing over to the station in wagons, there 


can play ball, get drunk or survey the beau¬ 
ties of nature, as pleases him best. The ma¬ 
chinery does not stop, except in case of a 
breakdown, so instead of a general nooning, 
the hands straggle off to their meals in squads 
all the way from 9:30 in the morning until 2 
in the afternoon, with somewhat corresponding 
hours at night, and their companions have to 
look after their work in their absence. Now, 
if this work were a tangled law case, or an op¬ 
eration or two for appendicitis, and were add¬ 
ed to a man’s regular duties, he might expect 
to have brain fever. But that is one good thing 
about factories. They seldom cause that kind 
of fever,and some of the extra work appears 
to consist in sitting on a tub and seeing a lot 
of wheels go round. In fact, there is a certain 
repose about a paper mill—not deep enough to 
be majestic, but in marked offset to the fren¬ 
zied activity that prevails in a shoe shop, for 
example. That is because so much of the toil 
is done by steam and iron. Instead of by 
hands. In things designed for beauty and the 
higher consolations, hand and brain must al* 
ways co-operate, but machines are doing pret¬ 
ty good work in the making of other machines 
and in the first shaping of raw materials. 

MORE SPACIOUS HZT" 
THAN AESTHETIC. tectural elegance 

in the Corinth 
mills the buildings have a substantial appear¬ 
ance and contain acres of floor. From the var- 



THE HUDSON AT CORINTH, SHOWING LUMBER FOR PULP. 


employment to thousands of those w'ood work¬ 
ing industries that keep other thousands busy; 
It would limit the navigation of the Hudson, 
it would dry and make unproductive hundreds 
of farms, and might lead to the unpeopling of 
villages. And all this can be averted by a 
little of the plain sense which similar misfor¬ 
tunes have driven into the less energetic and 
resourceful peoples of Europe. If instead of 
sweeping away all the timber on a mountain, 
the full grown trees are chosen, leaving the 
smaller ones to gain maturity, and if where 
clearings are created, saplings are set out, we 
should never lack for woods and water, and 
safety, health and prosperity would be as¬ 
sured to the .American people. 

You have heard the price of wood paper is 
going up. Very likely, for there is the begin¬ 
ning of a scarcity in the spruce trees from 
which it is made. This rise from $1.60 to $2.50 
a hundred pounds in two years is a par¬ 
tial result, to be sure, of good times. 


is a good freight line, and the mill keeps It 
busy. A laborer, passing, sniffs with superior 
knowledge and remarks that the woodpile you 
see ain’t nothin’. There ain’t no mor’n 10,000 
cords o’ wood in it. he don’t guess. You ought 
to see it when they’s thirteen hunder thou¬ 
sand cords. Whew! It cannot be that the 
gentleman has an accurate notion of figures, 
for the mill has probably not used as much 
as that since it started. It consumes from 
30,000 to 40,000 cords a year. 

There are 600 men in the paper mill at Cor¬ 
inth when it is running on full time, as it has 
been lately, for there is a double shift and the 
work never stops, day or night, except on 
Sunday, and not always then. On Sunday the 
men shift around, the day hands who have 
been on duty from 6:30 A. M. to 5:30 P. M., 
with an hour for dinner, changing to the night 
swing, when they must be up for thirteen 
hours. Every second week this overtime is 
balanced by giving a man two days off, and he 


lous yards and alleys they offer many pictuiv 
esque views, for the tall cliff beetling over the 
river forms the hack wall of some of the 
shops and storage places, and the damp stairs 
climbing from tier to tier of buildings re¬ 
mind one of the streets of Quebec. On the 
summit of the cliff is a red tower, 70 or 80 
feet high, in which the sulphuric acid is 
made aud froi^ which the fumes ar.e carried 
into the higher air. Waste marble from the 
Vermont quarries and sulphur from Sicily 
are the materials for this acid, and lying 
about the premises are tons of limestone, 
partly eaten by the corrosive. This acid Is 
necessary to break up the wood into pulp, 
and though It is said to be thoroughly 
washed out, the life of wood paper is short. 
Old books of the sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries are often seen as sound and clean 
to-day as when they came from the pfess, 
but in fifty j-ears from now probably not on* 
newspaper printed in the United State* *■ 


< 


















































82 


THE PAPER TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


the day whose date Is above this page, will he 
in existence. What’s that you said? What a 
blessing? Dear, dear! 

If literature implies permanence—which it 
oughtn’t, because look at It! newspapers are 
not literature—the relations between sul¬ 
phuric acid and intellect may be deplored, in 
the next century, by historians of boards of 
aldermen and Chicago highwaymen. The 
makers of the paper claim that it is as lasting 
as any, but I would like to show them some 
books that are turning brow'n and cracking 
on my shelves. 

A sign in the office of the mill bears this 
menacing legend. “International Paper Com¬ 
pany. Visitors will not be admitted to the 
mill.” Yet there is little trouble in obtaining 
permission, if the estray from elsewhere looks 


rinth a clean bill of health. It is 1,600 feet 
above sea level, well drained, environed by 
woods, and has pure air. 'When the people 
depended on w'ells there was some typhoid 
fever, for you still can’t persuade country peo¬ 
ple to separate their wells from their barn 
yards, but now that the town has a reservoir 
supply, the fever has almost disappeared. 

Leaving the acid to make itself up in the 
tower, we climb from the Inferno of sulphur 
to an inferno of noise. It Is a big, bleak 
room, filled with screechlngs as of many div¬ 
vies. For not only are particularly agonizing 
saws at work on the logs, which come tumb¬ 
ling down a trough from the sky, or some 
place, but the sections pass over to the bark¬ 
ers, and they make nearly as much noise 
again. What with the roaring, grinding. 



A FEW STICKS OF SPRUCE TO BE TURNED INTO PAPER. 


as if he did not intend to steal anything, and 
how he could steal anything in a place where 
nothing weighs less than a ton and every¬ 
thing is fastened down, is a mystery. 

’The first place visited is an inferno with 
seven ovens, which a young man is feeding 
with sulphur. An immense pile of brimstone, 
like a cliff of Aetna or the sulphur hills of the 
Yellowstone, is seen in a cavern adjoining, 
whence It Is trundled out and thrown by 
tons on the stone floor. ’The ovens are per¬ 
haps four or five feet wide and as many deep, 
but only a few inches high, and they are 
filled with.flames of green, blue and purple, 
quite beautiful to see, the violets among 
flame flowers, but not in the least pretty to 
smell, and suggesting the bad place, which 
the Rev. Dr. Crowe says became responsible 
for decreased church attendance when it went 
out of business. The vapors ascend through 
pipes leading up the face of the cliff Into the 
tower, high overhead, for conversion into 
acid, but a few of them escape. 

ODORIFEROUS fhat Te^wouM "su7- 

YET HEALTHFUL Lmmon^^ otj 

disease, for the fumesof theburningbrlmstone j 
make you cough and wheeze, and they bite \ 
your throat and nostrils, but the leading phj-sl- 
cian of the town says he has not discovered 
that any part of paper making induces disease ^ 
of a specific sort, and that the Irritation and 
cough caused by inhaling the fumes of sulphur 
and acid pass off after a few days. As to 
consumption, he says that he does not know of 
a solitary case that could he termed indigen¬ 
ous. It is all brought in from other places. 
Yet they have it in Saratoga and Glens Falls, 
fifteen miles away. Indeed, he gives to Co- 


screaming, pounding and grating, it is enough 
to make a New Yorker homesick. It is so like 
dear old Sixth avenue! A ’’barker,” it should 
be explained, is in no wise related to the 
hoarse-looking person who tries to lure you 
into shows at Coney Island by making you 
think they are fearfully wicked when they are 
disgustingly Innocent. The Corinth barker 
is a big wheel with knives planted along its 
face, and when a chunk of wood is pressed 
against it for a couple of seconds It rips the 
bark off so suddenly you cannot see where 
it goes. There is one offset to the hullabaloo 
in this department, and that is the fragrance. 
The smashed and harried fragments yield up 
the soft, rich, resinous odor of fresh wood, 
and it is hoped, for the men’s sake, that they 
know a good thing when they smell it. 

Next in the conversion of the tree to the 
substance that you, gentle reader (why gen¬ 
tle?) hold in your hand, is the chopping of the 
wood into pieces of the size of a silver dol¬ 
lar. A sifter, twenty-five feet long, a con¬ 
stantly revolving cylinder of coarse wire net¬ 
ting, receives the pieces, and sifts out all the 
smaller fragments. The conversion of the 
log sections into chips is accompanied by a 
thunderous drumming and a great dust. 

DYSPEPSIA HAS 

some hours, there 

NO TERRORS HERE. LlTp^ pi:: 

Into huge iron tanks, 40 feet deep—digesters, 
they are called—where they are cooked with 
the sulphuric acid. Presently the product 
comes running through troughs as a thin 
gruel, passes over a press and appears as a 
thick, flabby paper. 

For some grades the wood is chopped and 
packed into grinders, queer looking things. 


like Immensely ex.aggerated steering wheels 
of a ship. There is something fantastic, al¬ 
most goblinesque, in these forms seen in the 
half light. The body of the wheel receives 
the wood, which men drive in with hammers, 
and what suggest handles prove to be hy¬ 
draulic rams, that press It against huge grind¬ 
stones that you hear roaring inside. 

The digested product now goes into vats 
containing wire covered cylinders, or wash¬ 
ers, which separate from the water a scum 
which you are told is paper. There is then a 
blending of the coarser and finer pulp into a 
buff-colored pudding that dances off into the 
depths of a machine for farther mixing, and 
Is beaten and washed again. 

The last process is apparently the simplest, 
yet the most wonderful of all, for what is 
muddy water at one end of a long room 
Is reeled off as finished paper at the other 
end a few seconds later. The water con¬ 
tains the pulp, in finely disseminated particles, 
and as it pours into a broad, shallow trough, 
it is watered again by little squirts ejected 
from pipes that jig rapidly from side to side, 
to throw them evenly over the moving cur¬ 
rent. The pulp, so diluted that you hardly 
see it, except as a tint, now flows upon a 
in steam, then subjects it to a rubber roll that 
wire bed, which carries it under a hot cyl¬ 
inder, that seems to dispel some of the water 
squeezes out more of it; then, thickening and 
materializing under your eyes, it acquires tex¬ 
ture enough to be carried by endless strips of 
felt over dryers, and passes across more than 
twenty steam heated cylinders, over one and 
under the next—a battery of steel sixty or 
seventy feet long—then into a calender of 
shining cylinders, which smoothes the sur¬ 
face, and after this it passes upon the big 
spools in which it is delivered to newspaper 
pressrooms all over the land and is cut off in 
lengths to suit. One of these sets of machines 
makes 350 feet of paper in a minute; another, 
470; while a third, which Is the fastest in the 
world, runs off 506 feet. It is a triumph of 
mechanical ingenuity. The miles of strips that 
are sheared from the margins of these swift 
rolling sheets, together with other odds and 
ends, are sent back to the kneaders for work¬ 
ing in with new pulp, and the spools are after¬ 
ward rewound on another machine to make 
them tighter. Paper for books and magazines 
that are to be illustrated requires a more 
compact and glossy surface than newspapers, 
and is, therefore, hot pressed a second time. 

This branch of the industry is, in vari¬ 
ous of Us essentials, distinct from the manu¬ 
facture of the finer grades of paper from 
linen rags. The principal output of linen pa¬ 
per is from the Connecticut Valley, the great 
mills in and near Holyoke producing, it is 
said, the best paper in the world. Of all 
the great mechanical industries of the land 
this doubtless has the oldest history, for we 
know that the Egyptians, thousands of years 
ago, made their sheets of writing material 
from the papyrus—the plant that gave its 
name to the paper we use to-day in a land 
that Pharaoh never heard of, and on the other 
side of a world that he never knew was round. 

ISOLATION GOOD 

the Corinth mill one 

FOR INDUSTRY. strikes a fair aver¬ 
age of sobriety, in¬ 
dustry and intelligence. The isolation of the 
town, which may be a deterrent to its growth 
in some respects, is doubtless a gain in others, 
since it compels the people to be more inde¬ 
pendent and self resourceful. They have few 
amusements, although a show comes to the 
little wooden opera house once In a while, 
and it is quite possible that they are not as 
thrifty as they would be if they had a bank 
or some institution for savings. They have 


i 



























33 


THE PAPER TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


no time or money to visit Saratoga tor the 
purpose of salting away a part of their wages, 
and are said, as a rule, to spend all they make, 
some of them a little faster than they make 
It. The Illiterates among the workmen are 
few, and several of them have been pupils In 
the high school. If they are not graduates of 
that Institution. Most of them are ambitious 
for their children and hardly need the pres¬ 
sure of the compulsory education law to keep 
them in school. Said one of the men: "We 
want the kids to go to school, and they’ve 
got to go whether we want them to or not. 
I wish to God I could live a part of my own 
life over. You bet I’d have more schooling 
than I have. We don’t appreciate these things 
till we get too old tor them to do us any good. 
I was too fond of fun when I was a young¬ 
ster.’’ Like most of us. 

The Corinth mill hands are almost divided, 
as to nationality, between Americans, Ger¬ 
mans and Irish, and in working capacity there 
Is said to be not much difference. There are 
no obvious race distinctions In the town and 
while there Is more or less drinking and In¬ 
difference to the Sunday law. It Is claimed 


may also raise garden truck for his own table 
and save money. Formerly the paper com¬ 
pany advanced the funds to its men when they 
wished to build, but since It was merged into 
the trust it has, like the other trusts, severed 
its connection with outside enterprises. The 
officers, however, own several houses which 
are rented to employes. Including six double 
houses near the mill, each house containing 
five rooms and renting tor $5 a month. Though 
bare and unattractive In outward appearance, 
these cottages appear to be soundly put to¬ 
gether, and there is no complaint as to lack 
of repair. Their principal want is running 
^ater, the supply having to be dipped up from 
the river or brought down from a spring a 
hundred yards away. In even these homes, 
occupied by the laborers, one sees such 
things as plush table covers, crayon portraits 
and sewing machines. The wives and chil¬ 
dren, though cheaply and coarsely dressed, 
and not over clean, are not ragged and carry 
none of the marks of extreme poverty. Cheap 
rents, that seem so very cheap to a city man, 
are common all through this region. Why, 
there is one decent little house in Saratoga 


any other country. In busy seasons, there¬ 
fore, Corinth pays Its bills and whistles at 
Its work. 


PAUPERISM HAS 
NO PLACE HERE. 


The local priest, a 
pleasant, smiling 
man, says; "I cannot 
think of a single 


case of pauperism, or chronic dependence in 
this town. Of course, we have some people 
here, as they have In every place, who are 
weak, or lazy, or poor spirited, and they are 
frequently losing their jobs; and once In 
a while there Is an accident, In which case a 
subscription is taken up. But of downright 
poverty we have very little.’’ 

Labor unionism is slow to develop In small 
places. There is a nominal organization of 
the machine men, but It does nothing. 
As to Socialism, it is a mere rumor 
from the towns. Anarchy? In the country? 
Where there Is room and air and sunshine? 
No. It is a vague, undlsturblng dream of 
something that concerns Italy, or Spain, or 
some very foreign sort of place, of which one 
only reads In the papers. The ex-manager 
of the mill. Mr. Warren Curtis, Uvei 



TYPICAL DWELLINGS AT CORINTH, N. Y. 


that there Is little of the hoodlumism so com¬ 
mon to more densely peopled sections. Why 
should there be hoodlumism in the country? 
The desire of a boy to use his arms and legs 
need not be checked when there is all out 
doors to thrash around In. When he is cooped 
up In town he smashes windows and street 
lights because the police will not allow him 
to have any other exercise. Intemperance In 
the mill is said to be practically unknown. If 
a man wants to go on a bat on Sunday it is 
his own affair, but he must not carry it to 
work with him on Monday, or he loses his 
place. The churches appear prosperous, es¬ 
pecially the Catholic, and the Baptists have 
recently erected a tasteful tabernacle of brick. 
In the matter of reading, the Manhattan 
papers supply most of the needs, and the 
noisier and yellower they are the better they 
are liked. That is to be expected in com¬ 
munities that are intellectually crude, and 
education away from them will be a slow pro¬ 
cess. Immorality is not aggressive. A ma¬ 
jority of the mill men are married, and in ac¬ 
cordance with the well established rule, their 
families are larger in proportion as their 
wages are smaller. 


HOMEOWNERS 
ARE NUMEROUS. 


In the absence of a 
bank, one form of 
thrift Is common, 
and that is house 
owning. Most of the houses in Palmer are 
owned by the wage workers, and this is not so 
difficult as It may sound, for land, lumber and 
labor are cheap, and having the land a man 


Springs, recently painted and repaired, that 
rents for $5 a month, and it has a barn, a 
garden and Is only ten minutes’ walk from 
the business center. Near It Is a smaller 
house that rents for $3.50 a month. Think of 
that, you people who pay $20 a month for a 
row of cubby holes in a jerry built apartment 
house in town! The houses of Corinth are, 
in the average, comfortable In construction 
and furnishings. It would be Insulting to 
sympathize with their occupants on the 
ground of their poverty. They are not luxuri¬ 
ous, but they have the better quality of cozl- 
ness and homelikeness. There are carpets 
on the floor, books and magazines on the ta¬ 
ble. flowers in the window, cheap but well 
made furniture to sit on and eat from, spring 
beds to sleep on, a bird in a cage now and 
then, some prints and pictures on the wall, a 
parlor organ for the daughter of the house 
and whole glass and dishes in the cupboard. 
The era of plush and fret saw work yet lin¬ 
gers hereabout. The people have Sunday 
clothes to go to church in, and they eat meat. 

All this would be Impossible if a city ex¬ 
pense was to be met by a country wage. The 
officials of the mill are loth to talk of earn¬ 
ings, but it is understood that the average 
daily wage, taking all the mechanical de¬ 
partments together. Is $1.37V^. The machine 
tenders, or "machine men”—no reference here 
to politics—average $3.12, and only two of 
the;ji in the mill earn less than $3 a day. The 
pay oi paper workers is higher here than in 


here In Corinth In summer. In a woode* 
house, painted canary yellow, with whlt« 
trimmings—lives here In a comfortable de¬ 
mocracy in the same row with his mill hands, 
and Is liable to have his residence mistaken 
by the Infrequent stranger for the home of 
some one of the butchers or grocers. 

Yet, the ferment of uneasiness has begun. 
It shows itself not so much in grievance aa 
In apprehension, and, oddly, it affects out¬ 
siders more than employes. They say such 
things as "Corinth ain’t what It used to be. 
There ain’t any life here. Times are dull. 
The place is shrinking.” "Going into the 
paper trust was a bad thing for the men. 
They’re working harder than they did and 
they’re not making as much.” “So long aa 
the paper mill was by itself it was all right, 
but now it is in the trust there isn’t anybody 
knows what’s going to happen.” "There isn’t 
as much money here as there was and It 
affects our trade. Why, you can see how it 
Is, just from the railroad business. There 
isn’t the amount of stuff brought in here there 
was two years ago. If the town isn’t 
shrinkin’ the people eat less, I tell ye.” 

A keeper of boarders lamented that prices 
were so high. “I don’t see how it is,” she 
said, “though they say It’s the freights. The 
mill men pay $3.50 to $4 a week for board. 
They can’t afford to pay more. But here’s 
potatoes 50 cents a bushel, eggs at this time 
o’ year 24 cents a dozen, poultry 16 cents a 
pound, pork 12 to 14 cents, round steak U 


I 
























































84 


THE TArER TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


and sirloin 18. .4s to farm truck, why the old 
farmers that come in here with wagons 
charge 2 cents more for things than they do 
at the store. The farmers, they don’t make 
anything, either. It isn’t so easy living here 
as it used to be, and they say it's the mill.” 

One man was pronounced in his views. 
Said he, “This d- trust business is rais¬ 
in' h-. Why, it’s jest knocked the life out 

of this town. There used to be people coming 
here every day. Now we don’t see nobody. 
There ain’t even a drummer once a week. 
Corinth is goin’ to the dogs. And war’s goin’ 
to come of it. Yes, sir, war. Right here, 
on this ground. Gosh! The people ain’t goin’ 
to stand it. Before the mill became part of 
the trust the men was w’ell used. They’ve 
got men in there’s been with ’em twenty-five 
years, and never growled. Now, by gosh, 
they’re cuttin’ wages and firin’ the men— 
chucked off a third of ’em—and makin’ ’em 
work more, and they’s got to he trouble. Too 
bad! Too bad! Sight o’ money in the place. 
Three million dollars locked up in them 
buildings. They take out old machinery 
enough to start another mill with. The mill’s 
all right. It’s the trust is wrong.” 

TDIICTC \A/nDDV often that one 

InUOlO WUnni hears quite such posl- 

LABOR LITTLE. tive talk as that in the 

country. Nor were the 
allegations established by the employes. One 
of the men said, “I haven’t any kick coming. 
I can’t see that things are different from the 
way they used to be. The pay hasn’t been 
affected much, if it has at all. Maybe the 
men work a little harder than they did before 
the trust, but 1 haven’t heard any talk of or¬ 
ganizing any new union or of going on strike 
or anything of that sort. There aren’t any 
societies among the hands, except the ma¬ 
chine men’s union, and that’s pretty quiet, 
unless you mean the hose company. That’s 
mostly the paper men and they took a prize, 
too, at the firemen’s state convention. Oh, 
yes, there is another kind of a society. It’s a 
foot ball team. There are two of ’em. They 
play against the high school fellows every 
once In a while.” 

The contrast between the outer and inner 
view, as set forth in these two statements, 
may throw light on the state of grievances 
In bigger places than Corinth. 

One of the high officers of the trust in¬ 
sists that such statements are of no weight 
and do not represent a general sentiment, at 
least in Corinth, which he regards as a pro¬ 
gressive, growing and contented community. 
Says he: “The men are working practically 
as they have always done,no more and no less 
being asked of them. The policy of the com¬ 
pany has been to go slowly in making any 
changes, either in the treatment of employes 
or in the matter of wages. The idea that the 
cost of living has gone up in consequence of 
any change in policy of the International 
Paper Company is absurd. I can understand 
that there might he some villagers who know 
so little about what is going on in the world 
as not to understand that the coat of living 
everywhere is going up. but, while some have 
to pay more for their eggs, poultry and so 
forth, those who produce these articles are 
deriving a corresponding benefit. We have 
made no reduction in wages. New men have 
received slightly less, but in no single in¬ 
stance has the pay of an old employe been 
cut. Nor has the force been cut down. Now 
and then men are allowed to go who have 
been hired for special Jobs, but that has al¬ 
ways been the case.” 

This official denies that mischief has 
been done by the cutting of timber, 
though 1 could take him to places among 


the hills, where brooks in which trout 
used to swim thirty years ago, now run but 
a driblet of water and, in some instances, have 
absolutely disappeared, through the destruc¬ 
tion of the woods. He says: “Most of the 
lumbering in the .4dirondacks has been for 
soft wood. Where there is one soft wood 
tree there are many hard wood trees, and the 
latter are allowed to stand, as are the young 
soft wood trees. Nature is working to re¬ 
store the stand of timber on tracts that have 
been lumbered. The real menace to the for¬ 
ests is fire. Of all the destruction of forests 
in this country, two-thirds Is by fire or from 
natural causes. Great as the consumption of 
wood is by the paper industry, it Is insignifi¬ 
cant in comparison with that of the timber in 
the country as a whole. The state should 
help us in building dams that shall store the 
headwaters of the rivers.” 

That the company does nothing for its men 
except to pay their wages is what may be 
said of nearly all the commercial organiza¬ 
tions in the country, and of all countries. It 



Typical House, Corinth, N. Y. 


fulfills its contracts with them, and it may 
regard as sentimental extravagance such 
moves toward their happiness as have been 
started in a few places, for selfish reasons, 
if you will. It does not provide the men with 
lunch rooms and reading rooms, like those 
in Hartford, nor with play grounds, nor 
start a sick fund or death insurance society 
among them, nor is there any law to compel 
it to do so. It protects them against fire 
with hose and sprinklers, because incident¬ 
ally it protects its own property. It offers no 
prizes or other stimulation for neatness, con¬ 
stancy or industry; it gives no balls or pic¬ 
nics; it does not lend Its grounds or buildings 
for such matters. In short, it is a corpora¬ 
tion, like any other. A prominent citizen of 
the town, on being asked if the company had 
ever shown a personal interest in its men, or 
given privileges to them of any unaccustomed 
sort, replied, quite simply, with another ques¬ 
tion: “Wouldn’t the men be apt to look at 
anything like that as an interference?” 

The question rather takes one’s breath, for 
the world has recently been assuming that 
working people were like all others, in that 
they would take whatever they could get for 
nothing and take it cheerfully. The inquiry, 
therefore, implies that some of them could 


resent gifts and concessions as smacking of 
charity. But against that impossible possi¬ 
bility we might set off the alleged, if not act¬ 
ual, belief that manual labor is not sufficiently 
paid, and the likelihood that where money 
was not forthcoming the toller would eke out 
his due from parks, schools, libraries, reading 
rooms, gymnasiums, social halls and other 
devices provided for his betterment, without 
a protest. 

As to the paper makers, they are better off 
than many who do the same kind and amount 
of work, and as none of them appears to be 
oppressed, why shed tears? The farmers work 
harder, make less and are not as sure of what 
they do make, and if the laborers in town 
make a little more In actual cash, they have 
to spend proportionally more in higher rents 
and higher prices of living and do not get as 
much for their money. That there is an 
economical tendency in the present adminis¬ 
tration of the trust is probable, though the 
anxieties of Corinth are exaggerated. Thus 
far the alleged economies consist in the 
shaving of wages of what are called “outside 
men,’’ who handle the logs and do yard work 
and unskilled labor. New men receive about 10 
cents a day less than under the former ad¬ 
ministration. It seems very little, but it is 
with this class that every penny counts, and 
ten cents deducted from their $1.25 daily wage 
Is naturally more distinctly felt as a loss than 
if it had been taken from one of the $3 or $4 
men. Everyone is paid for overtime at night, 
and the laborer receives 50 per cent, extra 
if he is called upon to work on Sunday. New 
men, just taken on in the departments that 
require little more than muscle are said to 
receive $1.25, whereas they formerly received 
eleven shillings. People reckon here in York 
shillings, two to the quarter. The rates here 
named prevail in all paper mills. 

TDAIUIDC cannot be learned that 
I nAlVIro any of the men who have 

HFRF NOW have become 

tramps or gone to the bad. 
As one native says,“They’ve just drifted away, 
and we’ve lost sight of them. Of course, their 
going away has left houses empty, and that 
means rents have come down, and seem 
likely to stay down.” It is probably sig¬ 
nificant, nevertheless, of the prosperous 
state of affairs in the country that 
the tramps who used to penetrate even 
to such out of the way towns as Corinth, 
appealing to the citizens for handouts and 
sleeping in freight cars and sheds at the 
mill, have almost disappeared. 

And while the paper company attempts 
nothing outside of its business—except that 
the provision of electric lights to the town 
is ascribed to its enterprise—the people them¬ 
selves are making a little move now and 
then toward improvements. The high school 
has a library of three thousand volumes, 
which has been made free to all residents, 
and the Baptist Church is open on two after¬ 
noons a week for a general lending of books 
from its Sunday school library. As there are 
only 150 books, and not many of them pop¬ 
ular fiction, the range of activity is limited, 
but it is a beginning, and has moved the Meth¬ 
odists to talk of opening a free reading room. 
Then a field has be.;n appropriated by the foot 
ball teams, and on a pleasant Saturday you 
may seen big fellow with yellow touzled hair, 
who is the best player in the mill team, valiant¬ 
ly bunting his way to goal through a mass of 
struggling lads in sweaters, to the intense ex¬ 
citement of 150 youth of the vicinage. And 
there are a few secret societies and other 
social organizations to keep the men from 
going to bed too early. When the people have 
recovered from their fear of the trust 
Corinth may not resume its tranquillity, but 
it may do better: it may progress. 























9 


THE WORKERS AND THE STANDARD OIL COMPANY 






THe remarkable thing about the Standard 
Oil Company is not the conspicuity enjoyed— 
or otherwise—by Its principals; it is the diffi¬ 
culty in placing the 20,000 men who work for 
it. Oil City is the center of this company’s 
activities, and as you enter it you brace your¬ 
self for the customary sights of an industrial 
town: the roughly dressed idlers at the cor¬ 
ners, the dim, humid groggerles peopled by 
men in cowhide boots, jumpers and overalls, 
the frowsy women with shawls on their 
heads, the unkempt boys and girls, the cheap 
shops, the muddy streets, the smoke and 
smudge, the long reach of factory walls, the 
dull, almost hopeless air environing every¬ 
thing; and when you go to the hotel you ex¬ 
pect the clerk to act like the hotel clerks in 
the coal and coke district, who put D or S 
after your name, and when you mention 


pie own oil wells. Ah, yes. to he sure: You 
supposed the Standard Company owned all the 
oil in America. That fearful octopus drinks 
up most of it; that’s a fact; but it does not 
own all the holes that yield it. For example, 
in Ohio alone there are 7,000 oil firms and 
producers, and 4,700 employes who receive 
$2,754,000 a year; yet they sell the product 
with enthusiastic unanimity to the Standard 
Oil Company, because that pays the highest 
price and does not pay in notes. It owns 
the business, it has the tanks, it operates 
thousands of miles of pipe lines, it has cars, 
ships, shops and cash, and they say it has Sen¬ 
ators. Who, then, shall stand against it and 
how long? There are cries and lamentations; 
there are coils in political conventions; the 
Rockefellers have not where to set the soles 
of their feet without paying taxes for the 


companies. There are companies, too, in Wy¬ 
oming, California, Canada and Mexico that 
have saved their Independence, and the Stand¬ 
ard Company has not bought the Russian oil 
fields—yet. 

And to think that eighteen years ago you 
could buy Standard stock for 80 cents a share, 
while now it is $500. Doesn’t It make you 
grind your teeth? 

It all happened because the company was 
early on the ground and grew up with the 
country. It paid cash, which the people 
wanted; it gave work to hundreds,then thous¬ 
ands, who needed It; it gave purer, safer oil 
for 10 cents a gallon than its predecessors 
supplied for 20 cents to 50, and nobody got in 
its way except in order to be bought out. 

Now, either its men are afraid of it, and do 
not dare to speak, or slavery sits lightly on 



OIL REriNERY, FRANKLIN, PA. 


lodging give a start of surprise and say: 
“Why! Do you want a room?” 

But Oil City averts expectation and seems 
to defy scrutiny. Most of its }2,000 people 
ought to make oil, but they don’t. They are 
pretty busy in the immense tube works, in the 
well supplying shops. In the railroad freight 
sheds and they have to get out the Derrick 
and the Blizzard, the two well known and 
well managed papers. Yet, oil is the princi¬ 
pal source of pride. Interest and Income, and 
the chair warmers, with festoons of Florida 
moss under their chins, who congregate in 
the cheaper hotels and hold dowm the tops of 
cracker barrels in village groceries, are not 
talking about hay and turnips and shoats; 
they are bragging about their wells—or wall¬ 
ing over them, if they see a man coming in 
with a bill. Because thousands of these peo- 


whole township: the statesmen who have al¬ 
lowed themselves to buy stock in a good thing 
are looked upon with spurn; the refiner who 
starts a kerosene tank in Chenango or Ve¬ 
nango buys gatling guns, because he says the 
Rockefellers will steal into his premises, like 
wolves upon a fold of Assyrians, and devour 
him and burn his tanks, and there is no joy 


in him. 

OIL BUTTERS Therefore, what a shame¬ 
less content is that which 

MUCH BREAD 

000 people in this land of 
liberty, knowing as they do that their bread 
is buttered with petroleum! For, apart from 
the employes of this most monstrous of the 
trusts, 50,000 voters in the United States help 
to produce oil, and 30,000 of them operate 
wells of their own, either as individuals or 


them, for the company’s bitterest enemies ar# 
those who live farthest from it. There is no 
secret in the fact that it makes friends in 
legislatures; it does little for its men, except 
to pay them; it is capable of sinking a well a 
stone’s toss from some other fellow’s, if the 
other fellow’s is a gusher; it cripples opposi¬ 
tion by mean of fair wages, low prices and a 
monopoly of transportation; and for all that, 
there are no curses in the oil belt, unless they 
are whispered. One man who had put his 
little all into a well on his own property, and 
who makes perhaps $400 a year out of it, was 
startled the other morning to see a gang at 
work in a field next to his. The trust had 
bought the field and the gang was working 
for the trust. The well was finished and it 
yields about the same as his own. He merely 
smiles now, and doesn’t care. "I was afraid 


i 




































30 


THE WORKERS AND THE STANDARD OIL COMPANY. 


It might tap my oil,” he says,"but it doesn’t.” 
Then his smile broadens and he adds, “She 
haln’t been pumped for three days. Their 
gas Ingine busted Friday.” He looks at the 
unwelcome neighbor again, sighs a little bit 
and says, "I didn’t hardly think they’d do 
that.” 

The Standard Oil Company is an aggregate 
of companies, some of which pump petroleum, 
some refine it, some extract its by-products, 
some own or operate tank cars and steamers 
all over the world, and if one of these com¬ 
panies, or a prominent officer of a company, 
goes wrong, the Standard is held responsible 
by enemies of the trusts. It often has to di¬ 
vide itself up in order to get around anti¬ 
trust laws or to conform to state laws gov¬ 
erning corporations. Thus, the piping of oil 
Is done by the National Transit Company, New 
York Transit, Southwestern, Pennsylvania, 
Eureka, Southern, Northern, Crescent, Buck¬ 
eye and Indiana Companies, each run as a 


the lakes and the sea, because the average 
slope is slight and there are hills to cross. 
Hence, there are relays at intervals of 25 
to 50 miles, to enforce the flow and overcome 
the friction of the viscid mass. At Price’s 
Fork, Va.. the oil has ,to be lifted over a 
mountain 1,594 feet high, and there are eighty 
pump stations on the trunk lines, employing 
about six men apiece. All of these pipes are 
deeply sunk in the earth, out of the reach of 
frost and anarchs, and 135,000 barrels of oil 
a day flow through them, 16,000 other barrels 
going to shops and reflueries on boats and 
trains. Every now and then the pipes become 
gummy with paraffine. It would cost a lot 
to dig them up, uujoint them and wash them 
out with mops and soap, so they don’t do that: 
they insert at a pumping station a plug with 
metal scrapers, which is forced along by the 
flow of the oil and which frees the tube of 
paraffine, arriving at the next stand with three 
of four feet of dirty looking wax in front of it. 


to pull out of Oil City it would pull the 
backbone of the place along with it. Kick¬ 
ers? O’ course. Jever know a business didn’t 
have ’em? But I don’t guess but what they’d 
kick the hardest of the whole caboodle if the 
company busted. It gives ’em more for their 
oil and their work than anybody else would 
give ’em, and I tell you those, right now. 
Huh! You never heard of a strike here, did 
you? And you did hear of the raise the 
mechanics got. And got it without asking. 
Oh, I guess yes.” 

Which defense might be useful to read at 
the next convention in Kansas, if it was 
found that the delegates w'ere getting sleepy. 

What is oil? Nobody knows. We can 
name it when we see it, and know how to 
pump and sell and use it, but how it got 
here and what made it are to this day mere 
theory, and pretty wild theory, sometimes. 
There are men in spectacles—therefore, they 
ought to know—who maintain that it came 



WELLS ON OIL CREEK. 


separate organization, with its own officers 
and dividends—though the Standard Oil Com¬ 
pany is the chief stockholder in each. 

CDCAk’IMrni: of pipe lines, 

wiCMMliU Ur few people realize their 

PIPELINES. " 

double line of eight inch 
pipes extending from the Ohio field to Chi¬ 
cago, for instance; a double line of six inch 
pipes from the same field to New York; a 
six inch line to Cleveland; a four inch line 
to Buffalo, while from the Pennsylvania field, 
bigger lines run to New York, Bergen Point! 
Baltimore and Philadelphia, the oil that goes 
into the great refin’ing tanks In Brooklyn 
and Long Island City passing under the Hud¬ 
son and East Rivers and crossing Manhattan 
by a route concerning which secresy is re¬ 
quested; it is so conspicuous. Now and then 
some captain of a schooner, disregarding the 
signs on shore, drops his anchor under one 
of these pipes, can’t haul it up again, goes 
to the company, gets a warning and a new 
anchor and sails away. 

It is no easy matter to send the millions 
of gallons of crude oil through these pipes to 


All this business and a deal more is man¬ 
aged in Oil City, where the company has an 
office with nearly 200 clerks, and vaults as 
big as those of a safe deposit company. It 
has a telegraph system of its own, which 
centers here. Here likewise are the foun¬ 
dries and machine shops, where it makes its 
own engines, patterns, pumps and hoists, 
casts its own steel and burns its own gas 
under the boilers. It has an engine here 
that is operated on the principle of the naph¬ 
tha engine, the explosions being induced in 
natural gas by electric sparks. Also, it takes 
most of the product of the big tube works, 
which are virtually a branch of it, and local 
railroads and the Well Supply Company count 
on it for their living. So the Standard Oil 
Company is big medicine in Pennsylvania, 
and you must speak of it with bated breath 
until you get as far away as Harrisburg. 

1 nr*AI \l\C\kl neighbors, indorse 

LUUAL. VltW the whiskered resident 

OF THE TRUST. 

the Standard Oil Com¬ 
pany’s a trust, all right, but don’t go 
against it here. See? Why, if it was 


from rotting vegetation, during the car¬ 
boniferous period; but, if that is the case, how 
do you account for its being away down under 
the coal, with a cap of elate over it. when the 
tendency of oil is to rise? Then, there are 
folks who say that it was made by the action 
of carbon on iron, but, if so, where did the 
carbon come from and where is the iron now 
and why wasn’t it just as cheap to make 
steel? Possibly the unlikeliest sounding prop¬ 
osition of the lot is nearest to the truth, 
namely, that petroleum is the extract of many 
billions of sea organisms that perished ages 
ago, were buried under the ever thickening 
beds of mud at the ocean bottom and had 
this fragrant substance expressed from their 
remains. The old sea beds have been lifted 
into hills; the forests of giant ferns, reeds 
and mosses that first clothed the new land 
are how our coal beds, and down in the base¬ 
ment, not among the fossils but in sandstone 
and conglomerate, are the trilobites and 
things now serving in a fluid form to light to 
bed a race of beings that nature in their day 
had not even dreamed of. 

The recent history of oil has been more 












































THE WORKERS AM) THE STANDARD OIE COMPANY, 


37 


carefully recorded. People who are not shame¬ 
fully aged caa remember when fortunes were 
made and lost in a day. when Coal Oil Johnny 
could write his check for a million, before 
he had to go to driving a stage again, and 
when Titusville and Oil City were booming. 
The boom has gone out of the Alleghany 
Valley. The wells still flow, sparingly, hut so 
many more wells are running that prosperity 
has spread and an oil strike is only a day’s 
excitement. Look at Scio, O. In , the palmy 
days Scio would have remained intoxicated 
for five years after she had discovered pe¬ 
troleum on her premises, whereas now, at the 
end of a year or so, she is as demure as a 
Vermont village. ^ 

The character of Oil City—the typical oil 
town—has radically changed in thirty years, 
and this change is largely due to the central¬ 
izing of the industry and its reduction to 
modern methods. Just after oil had been 
struck it was the same sort of place as Lead- 
ville became a dozen years or so later. Spec¬ 
ulators and buyers swarmed in by boat and 
stage, prices were away up, everything was in 
a hurly-burly, the usual camp followers—the 
gamblers, confidence men, thieves, prostitutes 


may clean its streets. It will also not 
be likely to suiter again from the misfortune 
that befell it in 1892, when a freshet in Oil 
Creek burst an oil tank and the liberated 
oil, spreading over the surface of the water, 
came in contact with a flame somewhere 
and rolled past the town a flood of fire 
which burned fifty-seven people to death and 
destroyed houses and properly. Its principal 
bar to metropolitanism at present is the lack 
of a theater. It is everlastingly jealous of 
Franklin because Franklin has one. though 
t is a smaller town. When the last theater 
burned in Oil City actors who had recently 
played in it went about the Rialto shaking 
hands and buying glasses of milk for one 
another—it had been so “fierce.” 

The oil country in Western Pennsylva¬ 
nia is various, but it is largely a 
rough, hilly land, leanly forested, with 
ledges and gullies roughening and rcoring 
the steep banks of the rivers, which flow 
away with a rapid, turbid flood, and some¬ 
times have a skin of oil upon them. The 
plcturesqueness of the oil industry is less in 
lis aspects than in its surroundings, for the 
derricks are monotonous, except in twilight. 


torvals and piay on sec saws. They show 
some extraordinary engineering in turning 
corners and climbing hills, and always they 
have a poor, makeshift, unv/orkmanlike ap¬ 
pearance. The wells themselves are covered 
with black, greasy boards, and are not ve¬ 
hement in smell. The chances are two to 
one that if you step into the engine house 
to speak to the pumper you will find the 
place deserted and the engine operating 
tranquilly by Itself, or you may find a lad 
of a dozen years! 


At one of the pumps I 

GIRL ACTS AS found a girl of 17 or so. 

AM PMniMCrCD She was dressed in faded 
AN tNbINthR. patched and 

bedraggled, and wore an old sliraw hat, but It 
was evident that they were her working 
clothes. On’ suggesting that she step into the 
sunlight and have her photograph taken she 
viewed her raiment with alarm and said, "In¬ 
deed, I will not,” with a decided accent on 
the will. This girl was the daughter of a 
man who owned three wells on a ledgy hill¬ 
side and had put up a comfortable, if plainly 
furnished, house within a few rods of them. 
He was off helping another man loaf “dowa 



OIL TANKS, BAYONNE. 


EARLY DAYS. 


and dealers In chain lightning whisky—were 
early on the ground; dance halls, gaming 
houses and groggeries lined the main streets, 
there were- noisy Jubilations, bloody rows and 
violent deaths, men cheated and were cheated 
and hundreds were sorry they had gone there. 

Remaining on the lower 
KtLILo Or streets are relics of that 
time, and they look near¬ 
ly as old in years as 
they were in Iniquity when the town re¬ 
formed: one story shacks of plank, like those 
In Cripple Creek and Frozen Dog; bars so 
dark and advertising beer so unknown that 
even the thirsty tremble as they pass; wood¬ 
en hotels with four story names and two 
story accommodations: Palace restaurants 
where you can buy 21 meal tickets for $3, 
and two story tenements, dingy, frowsy and 
leaning out of the vertical. These derelicts 
will not last long. The t.-wn Is turning itself 
into brick, has pleasant homes, handsome 
churches, good schools and a good hotel. 
The roads leading to it are possible for bicy¬ 
cles, but not probable, and some day it 


when they have a gaunt, skeleton look as 
seen through the wasted wood. Save for 
thes*e derricks the valleys are lonely, and it 
is not one in twenty of them, any way, 
that has a house near it. Even the pumping 
is so managed that a single engine fuftlccs 
for tw'o to twenty wells, and it Is alleged that 
ill one case no less than seventy-five wells 
are operated by a single mechanism. 

This pumping is curious. As you pass 
along a lonely road you come upon a group 
of derricks and you see that they have throw'n 
out timber arms, from 25 to 1,000 feet long, 
to a mere shed of a pumping station, and 
these arms are pushing and pulling all at 
once, but not In rhythm. You would ask why 
cable is not used, but you must remember 
that in turning the clumsy ■wooden wheels at 
the well you must have a shove as well as a 
haul. Moreover, the wells are so grouped 
that when a piston descends in one it rises 
in another, the weight of oil in one tub 
therefore helping to bring a barrel of it near¬ 
er to the surface in another. The timbers 
that pump are Jointed together at 20 foot in- 


the road a piece,” and ma was doing th« 
breakfast dishes with grandma’s help. 

Although the people of this region are as 
.\merican as any you will find, the towns con¬ 
tain a considerable number of Irish and 
the Catholic faith is strong. Indeed, this part 
of the country was settled soon alter the 
Revolution by the Scotch-Irlsh, who were a 
hard muscled, stubborn set, fond of hunting 
and fishing, and good people not to quarrel 
with. On their lonely farms they seem 
to have degenerated in fiber, and when 
the oil fever seized them the average 
land owner was aptly described as a slow 
going farmer who owned a shot gun 
and a yellow dog, and who after he had 
struck oil devoted his time to sitting on a 
barrel in a grocery. But the rush of keen 
witted people Into the region had the effect 
of brightening the natives, and In their busi ¬ 
ness dealings they developed the shrewdness 
and aggressiveness for which they were fa¬ 
mous. They began to work and many of 
them made money. Towns grew overnight 
and railroads began to pierce the shaggy. 
























































38 


THE WORKERS AND THE STANDARD OIL COMPANY. 


lonely land. At first Titusville floated her oil 
barrels on flatboats down Oil Creek, and so to 
the Alleghany River, and down that stream it 
pursued a devious course to Pittsburg—de¬ 
vious, because It probably winds oftener to 
the minute than any other stream in Amer¬ 
ica. It cost $2 to send a barrel of oil by 
steamer to Pittsburg then, and $5 to send a 
passenger, though he had a berth and meals. 
Now the steamers have disappeared from the 
upper Alleghany. 

As a result of this activity so many re¬ 
fineries sprang up that they could work only 
one day in the week, and the oil produced in 
many of them was not only poor as to light¬ 
ing quality, but dangerous. Standard oil now- 
a-days is of at, least 150 degrees flash test, 
which means that it will not take fire from a 
spark until It has been heated to 150 degrees. 
These earlier refineries were speculative and 
they calculated to sell out after a little. It 
did not occur to them that a merchant was 
likely to give more than two or three orders 
for their stuff. The oil markets In the cities, 
too, were "rigged” by speculators, who had 
many scouts In their employment that knew 
the country and Its people, and are now 
quietly working for the Standard Company, 
or keeping shop, or editing papers. 


OIL SPECULATION 
IN EARLY DAYS. 


It was the duty 
of these scouts to 
find out where 
strikes were made 
and report as quickly as possible. A big 
strike meant a cheapened product, and that 
was a warning to gamblers In stock to sell. 
A failure in a region on which hopes had 
been erected meant a rise In stock; hence 
came the warning to buy, quick. In order 
to keep these scouts at a distance many of 
the companies surrounded their precincts 
with a regular military guard, armed with 
Winchester rifles, and the scout had to be 
cautious. He would snoop around in the 
twilight; he would climb trees when a well 
was to be “shot” or torpedoed, that he might 
guess at its probable yield from the geyser 
that came un in the first gush of oil, and he 
would then scramble to the nearest telegraph 
station and wire his news. 


An old scout recounting some of his ad¬ 
ventures the other night says that he was 
captured on the enemy’s premises once, but 
was let off. Several times he was ostensibly 
fired at, but he never was afraid of the 
guards, for they were old acquaintances of 
his—woodmen and bark peelers—and he no¬ 
ticed that they usually fired into the air. 
Once there was a race between the owner 
of a well, who was mounted, and a scout who 
was afoot, to reach a telegraph station after 
a well had been opened. The man afoot 
was first, because the horseman had to go 
around by a muddy road. The scout was Just 
handing in his report when the horseman 
tore up at the door, slapped a $20 bill under 
the operator’s nose and said: "My dispatch 
goes first.” The scout “saw” the twenty 
and did the same. The owner was about to 
pull out another bill, when the scout cried: 
"You just get that dispatch of mine onto 
your wire, or I’ll kick your whole dam place 
down.” And the dispatch went. The spec¬ 
ulators who were waiting at the other end 
of the wire, in Bradford, sold immediately, 
getting the advantage of the other set that 
was waiting to hear from the owner. 

In those days 45,000 people lived in the val¬ 
ley of Oil Creek, and the tankage at so pre¬ 
sently inconspicuous a place as Clean, N. 
Y., was 4,000,000 barrels. Wells were pro¬ 
ducing at a rate that promised everlasting 
wealth for their owners and people would 
not listen to any talk of their playing out. 


Now, with 69,000 wells in operation in the 
oil region a couple of barrels a day is re¬ 
garded as a satisfying yield; but this region 
has grown. It begins in southern New York, 
runs southwest through Pennsylvania and 
West Virginia, then reaches into Ohio and 
Indiana. It lies parallel with the Alleghany 
range, and from twenty-five to fifty miles 
distant. Burning Springs, W. Va., is called 
the southmost point, and thirty years ago it 
was productive ground. It is not much re¬ 
garded now, although new wells have recent¬ 
ly been bored there. Of all this vast area 
the Standard Oil Company owns a third. Tn 
the rest of the region it buys from the well 
owners, or renters—because sometimes the 
farmer with oil under his potatoes has not 
the money for making experiments, and he 


have an impervious cap of slate, and if the oil 
leaks through any break It exhausts itself. 
Therefore, you can never tell until your well 
is in operation whether it is going to be a 
fizzle or a gusher. You only know that it will 
not stay down when it has a chance to get 
out. It is this same rock, or sand, that sup¬ 
plies natural gas. 

Now, you would say that a rough, smoky, 
poor looking region would produce a rough, 
smoky, poor looking class of men. The oil in¬ 
dustry has created a human environment that 
is not always esthetic, though it is generally 
innocuous; whereas, a larger human environ¬ 
ment will create industries that will be pleas¬ 
ing, when these towns have time and chance. 
Oil City wiil not only have its theater, but 
will have the library which Mr. Carnegie and 



SLOVAKS, BAYONNE REFINERY. 


leases the right to bore on his land to a more 
pecunious or speculative person. In • that 
case, if oil is struck, the farmer gets a.s 
rent, or royalty, one-eighth of the product. 

In the Pennsylvania region the oil is com¬ 
monly found among the hills which expose 
strata of gray shale along their sides, oc¬ 
casionally striped with a coal seam. The dip 
of the strata is slight, on an average, usually 
but 16 feet to the mile, yet one can never say 
whether he will have to bore 150 feet or half 
a mile. Indeed, there are wells in operation 
near Oil City that go to a depth of 3,500 feet. 
The hills are curiously troughed, with a reg¬ 
ularity suggesting city streets, by long, 
straight runnels of brooks, and are cleft by 
deeper valleys where one is liable to find 
whole colonies of oil men and derricks by the 
hundred above the winding, muddy roads. 
When the derrick has been put up the well 
men go to work with a bit 4 feet long rfnd 
4 inches thick and an augur stem 60 feet long 
on top of which is a rope socket and more 
things, and this invention pounds and rasps 
its way into the bowels of the earth until it 
has reached the conglomerate stratum which 
contains the oil. Once in a while the oil 
com^s up without a shaking, but more 
usually the well must be torpedoed and this 
process is an excitement. 


‘‘TORPEDOING’’ 
A WELL. 


Canisters pf nitro-gly- 
cerine are lowered to 
the bottom and a go- 
devil is dropped upon 


them, each canister exploding into the other 
and making what ought to be a mighty dis¬ 
turbance. But little is heard or felt on the 
surface. After a moment or so, however, the 
oil is heard gurgling up the tube and present¬ 
ly it bursts into the air and plays for a hun¬ 
dred feet. The gas pressure relieved, it sinks 
once more, and thenceforth must be pumped. 
.\11 the oil bearing sands and conglomerates 


some others have offered, on consideration 
that it will keep it up and read, some times. 
Had oil been struck in the middle of Chicago, 
the borers and pumpers would naturally go to 
the opera and the art gallery and dote on 
Browning; but strike it here in the fields and 
you get only what the fields give you. It will 
depend on yourself how much that is. 

As a matter of fact, the oil men are a good, 
honest, industrious lot of American citizens, 
in the mass. They do not get drunk oftener 
than the average, and when they work about 
the refineries and tanks they do not get drunk 
at all; at least, not if their bosses know it. 
A drunkard in an oil refinery would be as dan¬ 
gerous as a bomb, and a smoker is regarded 
with horror. A cigarette fiend with a match 
might blow himself and a dozen others into 
the next county, if he had a kerosene tank 
to play with. 

The wives of these men have enough to 
wear, the children have a common school edu¬ 
cation, tho men themselves are roughly but 
decently dressed and they live in wooden 
houses of a conventional type, containing 
five to eight rooms, and are on good terms 
with their neighbors. The SUndard Company 
has held the policy from the first of keeping 
its useful men and advancing them when pos¬ 
sible. Boys who enter its clerical force, at 
the age, say, of 16, look for advancement in 
three years, and generally get it. The chief 
drawback in what may be called the field work 
arises from the uncertainty of oil, for when a 
gang has rigged a certain well it may have 
no work for a week, and, therefore, no pay. 
But the sensible men among them have 
learned, after all these years, to adapt them¬ 
selves to this circumstance, and they save 
enough from one week’s wages to carry them 
for two. Many of them—it would not be right 
to say most—have bank accounts, or have put 
money into building associations, or hava 






















THE WORKERS AND THE STANDARD OIL COMPANY. 


S9 


bought houses. Best off are those who, being 
In the country, have bought little farms, to 
which they can retire In a dull season and 
raise enough to live on, regardless of the oil 
yield. Then, too, there Is the chance that 
this farm Itself may have grease under It, 
and a man who can pump two or three barrels 
of oil Into the company’s tanks, getting his 
little $1.66 a barrel for It, can feel middling 
Independent in the country. 


HERE’S A SAMPLE 
WELL OWNER. 


Let us call on one 
of these well own¬ 
ers. His house is 
on a steep hillside 
in the valley of a brook. There is a glorious 
vista down the valley of a river and the cas¬ 
cades of ice that drape the cliffs are glisten¬ 
ing in the morning sun. We find him potter¬ 
ing about his wells and noting the outflow of 
salt water from his tank. Because salt water 
always comes up with the oil. It sinks to the 
bottom of the tank and Is drawn off at a fau¬ 
cet which Is shut as soon as oil begins to run. 
He is a middle aged man with a brown, out 
of door complexion, wears linsey-woolsey 
clothes, a cap, a Jumper and heavy arctics. 
His oldest boy is sliding down the road with 
half a dozen other barbarians on sleds, and 
with a hundred yells r.nd whoops, for being 
Saturday there is no school. His little girl in 
a warm dress with cloak and v.-oolen hood la 
watching the sport from the porch of the 
house above, a story and a half affair with a 
hen house and garden. 


“Yes, I own these two wells here,” he says. 
"They’re making three-quarters of a barrel 
apiece a day, so I can’t kick. I generally wait 
till I have thirty or forty barrels in my tank 
here, and then sell. The Standard Oil people 
are all right, so far as I’m concerned. They 
pay me on the nail, and as often as I want 
the money. There aren’t as many people 
around here as there used to be, because the 
wells are not paying as they did. Then, since 
a big company began to handle the stuff not 
so many men are needed. Why, at first there 
used to be a man to a well. Now, I don’t sup¬ 
pose there’s one to twenty wells.” He looks 
at the dark .green liquid that is drizzling into 
his tank at each sob of the pump, and says: 
"I came up here because I was tired of the 
town. I didn’t think of oil at first. I was 
in the machine shop for sixteen years, and 
what is It? You don’t have any liberty and 
you can’t save anything. Beside, It didn’t 
agree with me, and I wasn’t well. I bought 
a little farm back here, so that it costs me 
nothing to live. I have all the vegetables and 
eggs and milk I want and I’m happier than I 
ever used to be down there,” pointing down 
the valley. ”It cost me about a thousand 
dollars to have these wells drilled. One Is 
600 feet deep and the other 700. Then 1 
bought this steam engine—look in here.” He 
leads the way Into a shed where a battered 
old machine < f possibly ten horse power in 
its best days, but now hardly trustworthy be¬ 
yond five, you would say. Is lazily and leak- 
illy poking the pump arms. It stops while he 
Is talking about It, and he stokes It up with 
wood. "Guess what I paid for this,” he adds. 
"I bought it for $26, but the repairs on It 
brought it up to about a hundred. I use a 
little natural gas, just to keep the boiler 
from getting cold, nights, but I work the ma¬ 
chine with wood. The Standard Oil people 
charge 20 cents a thousand for gas through 
this country, for lighting, and 10 cents a thou¬ 
sand for manufacturing.” 

In the house of this satisfied producer you 
find curtains at the windows, rag carpets on 
the floor, china with printed decorations on 
the table, flowers in the window, some rather 
melancholy looking chromos and photographs 
on the walls, a few books and papers and beds 


and chairs that are not uncomfortable. There 
are other houses in the neighborhood that 
have more ambitious furnishings, and in near¬ 
ly all of them you discover the home like air 
of places that are made to live in. They have 
their society, too, in these rather iX)or look¬ 
ing hamlets, and it might surprise you to dis¬ 
cover that in many instances the society had 
a religious foundation; that is, it took shape 
originally as a sewing circle attached to a 
church, or a Bible class connected with a 
Sunday school; for these people suggest in 
some particulars the residents of the New 
England villages, w’here old fashioned Amer¬ 
icans are found, and where religious matters 
are still sacred. 

Apart from the 
effect of the 
church on daily 
life the morali¬ 
ties of the district are improving. All trace 
of the days of wild cat wells have disappear¬ 
ed; there Is only a customary amount of loaf¬ 
ing and drinking in the towns, the oil scout 
and prospector have no employment, and 
there are no gambling houses or dance halls. 
The liquor laws are more rigidly observed In 
Western Pennsylvania than in most other 
parts of the country, and Sunday closing Is 
not a mere form. 

The lowest wage paid by the Standard Oil 
Company Is given to Its laborers, and is $1.50. 
During thf hard times a few years ago, when 
most of the manufacturing industries were 
sorely pressed, wages for unskilled labor 
were generally cut, hut the Standard Oil 


MORALITIES SH 
IMPROVEMENT. 


pinch. Their work is almost always ditch¬ 
ing for pipe lines, and there is not very fre¬ 
quent need for their services. When they 
establish a colony of their own they live In 
even worse fashion than do the Huns and 
Poles. A shed suffices for them, and they 
seem to care no more for the appearance and 
surroundings of this shed than the Siwash 
of Vancouver island do for the surroundings 
of their lodges; Indeed, they ai^ strikingly 
alike in their lack of disposal of garbage and 
offal. In their litter of bones and cans and 
boxes. They are usually a peaceable. Indus¬ 
trious company, these Italians, and In the 
evening after their work will gather In the 
air about their shelter and toast their shins 
before a fire, smoke bad pipes, chatter like 
magpies, sing, and once in a while dance. 
Though not good shots they are fond of 
hunting, and the birds always suffer near 
their camps. State laws for the protection of 
birds are of no consequence to them, and so 
long as a creature has wings it appears to 
them a fair mark. 

The shed in which they are content to live 
for weeks at a time is but eight or nine feet 
high, of rough boards with wood strips at 
the seams, the roof is of tarred paper, which 
is pccasionally added as a sheathing for the 
whole house. Inside there are a rusty stove, 
some decrepit chairs, boxes and benches also 
supplying seats, and tin plates and cups suffice 
for china. Occasionally there is a newspaper 
print or a cigar box chromo or pictured cal¬ 
endar on the wall, and the light comes 
through two or three windows entirely inade- 



COMPANY HOUSES, $7 


A MONTH, EEANKLIN, PA. 


Company maintained its prices until good 
times were restored. In the fields almost all 
who receive this wage are Italians, and they 
are merely employed by the job. In the re¬ 
fineries they are oftener Huns, Polacks and 
Slovaks. The company prefers Americans, 
and will give places to them before all other 
applicants, for it finds them most intelligent, 
and best adapted to the life of the oil dis¬ 
tricts. They are inventive and ambitious, too, 
and may be trusted to do work than can not 
safely be left to the immigrants. 

The Italians, in addition to their wmges, are 
provided with quarters in remote districts 
among the mountains and are oven fed, on a 


qua.te either for Illumination or ventilating. 
The men sleep in bunks arranged in a doubi* 
tier and strewn with hay or straw, each pro¬ 
vided with a piilovv and blankets. The air 
■indoors is fetid with dirt and ancient pipe 
smoke. 

But these laborers do not always ask the 
grandeur of a wooden structure. They are 
content with any place that will keep the 
rain off. To them America is merely a bi¬ 
vouac. So soon as they have money enough 
they will return and wear purple and cheap 
linen, and fare every day on bread and on¬ 
ions aud sour wine, and will ask nothing 
more, except an occasional wedding in the 






























40 


THE WORKERS AND THE STANDARD OIL COMPANY. 


Beighborhood. Where there are no cabins or 
shanties they will be content in caves and 
holes In a bank, and wickeups of boughs and 
scantling. The object Is not to get anything 
out of life as they go along but to save the 
dollar and a half. 

rnnn dav cnc screw 

GOOD PAY rOn pipe together and han- 

SKILLED MEN. f 

which the pipe Is 
turned make $2.50 a day. They have 
to be men of skill in their specialty, 
for they must know whether or not 
an end Is threaded right and will make 
a tight joint. The connection men who help 
the tong men at the wells and lay pipe 
from the well to the tank make $60 a month. 
Still better paid are the gaugers, who meas¬ 
ure the oil at the various tanks, gauging by 
quarter inches, and reporting to the company, 
which then credits up on its books the oil 
which it buys. The company’s day opens at 
7 o’clock. The measuring begins at that hour, 
and as soon as possible Is telegraphed to the 
office. At 11 o’clock the entries are made 
and the well owner can call for his check. 
The foremen earn $125 a month and the su¬ 
perintendents, of whom there are nine, make 
$2,400 a year. In the refineries and works 
where paraffine, lubricants and other by¬ 
products are made the average dally wage is 
$ 2 . The laborers get $1.50, the ordinary me- 1 


two stories high, with yards around them and 
convenient to shops, schools and churches, 
range from $7 to $18, and on the outskirts 
the charges are lower, while prices for the 
necessaries of life are also moderate, espe¬ 
cially those for gas and coal. Gas is com¬ 
monly used through the oil district for cook¬ 
ing and heating, as well as for lighting, and 
where a man has a well of his own he is in¬ 
ordinately wasteful. In dozens of farm house 
yards it blazes from a pipe all day, as well 
as all night, because the owner does not 
think it worth while to turn it off. It is not 
as bright as the manufactured gas, being 
yellower and duller, but by the use of mantles 
the lighting power is increased. 

Of course, a good many of the men are 
boarders In the towns, paying from $3 to $5 
a week, and in the country they find cheap 
board with the farmers. When board and 
lodging are not to be bad at an important 
center, the company puts up habitations 
which it rents at a moderate figure, say $3 
and $4 monthly; but these are makeshifts 
only and as a rule the company has kept out 
of land schemes, as it has kept entirely out 
of company stores. An exception is made at 
the Eclipse Works, at Franklin, Pa., where 
140 by-products of petroleum are manufac¬ 
tured. The big shops, occupying 120 acres, 
employ 600 men and use up 10,000 barrels of 
crude oil a day, turning out, among other 



SLOVAK TENEMENTS AND CHILDREN, BAYONNE. 


chanlc, $2.77, hut the extraordinary mechanic 
makes $4.50. 

As this scale is above the usual, there is 
little discontent among the oil workers. 
Strikes do not happen, except from legisla¬ 
tors, and nobody knows whether they suc¬ 
ceed or not. The labor organizations, where 
such exist among the employee of this com¬ 
pany, are found only in the shops, like that 
In Oil City, where pumps and engines are 
made. Such organizations are small, the iron 
molders going off by themselves, the ma¬ 
chinists by themselves and so on. That no 
union exists among the mass of the men is 
due chiefly to their wide dispersal over the 
country, the men in Ohio having nothing to 
do with the men in West Virginia, and so on. 
Among the owners of wells who sell to +he 
Standard Company there is no community 
of interest. They are rather against one 
another, as business rivals, than disposed to 
union. 

In places where shops and refineries have 
been established, there are a few social or¬ 
ganizations, bail clubs, and in two or three 
Instances assessment benefit societies, but they 
are seldom permanent. In various places the 
custom of the company is to pay the doctors’ 
bills where a man is hurt or is taken ill in 
its service. 

, Living in most of the oil towns is not ex¬ 
pensive. Rents for comfortable little houses. 


products, 400 barrels of paraffine wax, white 
and clean enough to eat. Most of this product 
goes to Europe. The sons of native farmers 
are preferred here. The majority know some¬ 
thing about oil before they go there, for their 
fathers have wells of their own. They have 
never struck or made trouble. These works 
never shut down, day or night, the unskilled 
men serving in twelve hour shifts and the 
mechanics nine and ten hours. 

GOOD HABITS Xed'e;: X 
NECESSARY HERE. smokes or drinks. 

He would be as 
dangerous among the gases and inflammable 
fluids as a box of matches in a powder mill. 
It is interesting to discover that these men 
are almost equally divided in politics, but 
heelers and orators are never allowed in the 
shops. Most of the men have a church affilia¬ 
tion and the Eclipse directors have subscribed 
to many church organs and Sunday school 
libraries. When these works were started the 
company bought 1,500 acres of land, on which 
it built forty houses. This it did because there 
were no residences near the place, and be¬ 
cause it wanted some of its men handy in case 
of explosion or fire; but the men do not like 
to be tenants, and the company does not like 
to play landlord. As the rentals range from 
$3 to $7 a month, there is no profit on the 
sum invested, and the men who live within 


sight of headquarters feel that they are 
watched, if not coerced. It is declared by one 
of the officers that he is sorry to have any¬ 
thing to do with these company houses, for 
a worthless tenant cannot always be put out, 
and it is the poorest men who want them. 
These men rent them because they think by 
so doing they will curry favor with the com¬ 
pany. Wherever the workers have shown any 
get-up-and-get the company has advanced 
money to them that they might build houses 
of their own. The Americans have been found 
to be of the greatest advantage here, because 
they have the most Ingenuity. In 999 cases 
out of 1,000 it is claimed that the well owners 
of western Pennsylvania are Americans, too. 


Constable Hook, a cape rising a few feet 
above the marshes below Jersey City and 
surrounded by tide mud and the City of Ba¬ 
yonne, has the largest refinery la the world. 
It covers something like three hundred aerps 
and presents to view a labyrinth of tanks, 
stills—neither the tanks nor stills that wit¬ 
lings will think of—derricks, sheds, shops, 
pipes, engines, tracks, trains, pumps, and is 
filled with solemn, awe inspiring smells. There 
are over 3,500 men in all departments and the 
work goes on night and day, to the mighty 
distress of the folks over on Staten Island, 
who breathe smoke and gas and the charac¬ 
teristic odor of decayed garlic, and who dare 
not go in swimming for fear of being poisoned 
by the sludge acid that purls along the surface 
of the Kill von Kull. Still, oil has to be 
made somewhere, and by general consent of 
almost every other place it is made at Ba¬ 
yonne. Here again the work is such as to pre¬ 
clude the employment of alcoholic enthusiasts 
and smokers, ’n the making of kerosene, for 
instance, caution must be used, though the 
process Itself does not look cautious. The 
crude oil, piped from Pennsylvania into 
mighty tanks, is vaporized by fire in air tight 
stills, the vapor condensed in a series ol 
pipes, and this distillate is made additionally 
safe by the extraction of naphtha by steam. 
The oil is then treated with sulphuric acid in 
an agitator, which removes certain impurities 
that would discover themselves ia smoke and 
stench if used in a lamp, and the product is 
then ready to ship. What is left after the 
kerosene is extracted is a dirty grease, which, 
after going through mysterious pipes that 
are coated with frost, comes out In white 
sheets as paraffine, and what is left after the 
paraffine is taken out is the tar. and what is 
left after the tar has been attacked is the 
heavy lubricant that is replacing Barren Isl¬ 
and fat as wheel grease and boarding house 
butter. 

~ If fate sends you to Bayonne you can rent 
a room there for as little as $1 a month—and, 
just think! you can see New York, when it is 
not too smoky. Houses in the habitable part 
of the town rent for as much as $20, and even 
a good flat brings $18; but in the unhabitable 
parts, near the refinery, you can rent for $5 
a month and the county will bury you. Yet 
they say that the stench of oil is healthful. 
It may act as an emetic at first and destroy 
your appetite for a week, but you can grow 
used to anything, except wealth. The health 
of the people w-ho work in these refineries is 
generally good, and, as they are not topers, 
the insurance companies exact no extra risks 
from them, no matter what departments they 
are in. 


^1 nriTF Bayonne and la 

OLUVAAO UU I t associated works at 

ON FUNERALS. 

where they are held 
responsible for the refusal of the population 
to increase —the skilled men are natives, la 
the mass, but there are many Irish, and of 


























THE WORKERS AND THE STANDARD OIL COMPANY. 


41 


late the Huns and Slovaks have began to as¬ 
sert themselves. The part of Bayonne recent¬ 
ly known as Irlshtown, a squalid region be¬ 
tween the oil works and the marsh, Is now 
peopled almost entirely by Slovaks. They 
have built a Greek church near by, 
with bulges on Us steeple that remind 
you of the onion shaped domes of the 
Pokrovsky Cathedral at Moscow. They 
Just dote on funerals and want a brass 
band with every one. They have started 
a promising graveyard in a desert just with¬ 
out the walls. There one may wander among 
Iron crosses and marble headstones when the 
sinking sun throws the shadows of oil tanks 
over the premises and the southern breeze 
bears upon Us wings odors that paralyze the 
mosquitoes. As you ramble through the mean¬ 
dering streets of the city of Iron, oil and 
smells you come upon these Russians lugging 
burdens and wheeling barrows, dull people, 
not sullen, arrayed, as they ought to be, in 
coarse clothing and overalls. These men are 
employed about the heavier tasks because 
they do work that Americans refuse to do. A 
native went there last summer, protesting 
that he was starving, that his children had 
nothing, and he would accept any sort of 
task. There was no vacancy except at the 
furnaces, where it is as hot as love, even in 


.January, and this was in July. All right, he 
would take It. At noon he called at the office, 
saying he was through and demanding his 
pay. 

“But it you leave now you will lose your 
job," he was told. 

“To h— with the job. Give me my money,” 
he cried. 

And that was the last of him. A Slovak 
would have taken that work and held on to 
it through thick and thin. As a rule the 
Americans near the cities will not accept a 
laborer’s position, yet there are exceptions, 
and here is a remarkable one: Some months 
ago there appeared at the refineries a quiet, 
decent young fellow who minded his own 
business, worked hard, fed himself sparingly 
and spent his nights in a mean lodging house 
with books. The men did not know at first 
what to make of him, and thought that he 
was putting on airs; but after a while they 
learned what he was up to and they took up a 
collection of $50. When they offered this 
money to him he was moved, but he absolute¬ 
ly refused to accept it, for he knew that they 
had families, and as he was a mechanic’s 
helper he was making $9 a week, so that he 
would not starve. The horny handed com¬ 
pany reluctantly but ad.-niringly put their 
pelf back into their pockets. For this day 


laborer in greasy overalls was a Harvard stu¬ 
dent, who was earning enough to carry him 
through another term, and if you go to Cam¬ 
bridge you shall find him there, girding away 
at his studies and making a specialty of po¬ 
litical economy. 

Here is another curious circumstance about 
the Americans in the Bayonne work refinery: 
they want to work! Recently it was proposed 
that the mechanics, who at present 
spend nine and even ten hours each day 
in the place, going home at night, 
should rearrange their hours, so as to 
work on eight hour shifts, for exactly the 
same pay. They talked it over and declined. 
Yet It was not entirely because they loved the 
shops; it was partly because their wives and 
boarding house keepers would do such an 
everlasting amount of objecting to the fur¬ 
nishing of meals at inconvenient hours, es¬ 
pecially at 4 A. M. 

A little wash house has recently been added 
to the outfit of the works, where the men 
may change their clothing and take a shower 
and a rub down. .A.t first they were shy of it, 
especially the Slavs and Poles, hut more and 
more of them are using water and even soap. 
Orfe frank fellow said to the superintendent: 
“We fellows hate to be respectable, but after 
getting in the way of it we find we like it." 


THE TOBACCO TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES, 


Not all of the smoke that hangs above the 
City of Richmond. Va., is made by cigarettes. 
A good deal of it comes from soft coal. Rich¬ 
mond. envious of the fa.me of Pittsburg and 
Cincinnati, is said to be plotting to celebrate 
herself by a moBe plenteous output of soot, 
for in those other cities they contend that 
soot is healthful, that it conceals many archi¬ 
tectural and moral defects, and produces what 
the painters call “tone,” though to the out¬ 
sider it seems a low tone. 

But. while Richmond does not breathe all 
of the smoke that you see streaming across 
the sky and settling on your shirt front, it 
provides material for other people to do a 
dreadful lot of smoking. Those who believe 
that the cigarette is a coffin nail, or that it 
is an encouragement to uncleanliness and vice, 
cannot view Richmond without alarm, for 
more “clgareets” are made in that town than 
in any other in the world. 

It is gratifying to find some ideas respecting 
these implements of alleged destruction base¬ 
less or exaggerated. For instance, it is given 
out that the cigarette is composed of one part 
tobacco and nine parts old rope, cast off 
shoes, hoof parings, street sweepings, jlmson 
weed, onions, cabbage and butts gathered out 
of the gutters by tramps. In Paris you sus¬ 
pect something like this, because you see that 
butt gathering is a legitimate industry, and 
bummers spreading their morning catch to 
dry on the quays of the Seine are a familiar 
sight to early risers in that capital. The butts 
would not be gathered unless somebody 
smoked them, and when you consider what 
the best of French tobacco is, and are brought 
face to face with the fact that many of these 
cigar stumps must be the worst, even before 
they are second hand, the horror of the 
thought discourages you from smoking any 
more until you get back to America. But in 
this country it appears that there is tobacco 
enough for the populace without calling in 
the butt hunters of New York and Chicago 
to supply material. At all events, you see 


no butts, no rope, no tar, no potato parings, 
no rags in the Richmond factories. 

When this capital of Virginia was left at 
the close of the war stripped. Impoverished, 
confronted with untried social conditions, 
menaced with adversities almost as heavy as 
those incident to war, it was tobacco that 
helped her back into something better than 
her old state. .\nd more and more of the 
wealth that Is flowing in and converting it 
from an ancient, ramshackle, uninviting town 
to a modern and beautiful city arrives through 
the addiction of Americans to the tobacco 
habit. When you go to the town with mem¬ 
ories of what it was just after the war, you 
will be delighted to see the increase in hand¬ 
some homes, clubs, churches and schools, in 
the asphalted streets, in the shade trees and 
gardens, and you will lodge—if you are wise 
enough and rich enough—in a hotel that was 
constructed, like an Aladdin’s palace, out of 
smoke. This hostelry, the most conspicuous 
architectural ornament to the city and the 
equal of the Waldorf or the Ponce de Leon 
in its appointments, was constructed out of 
cigarettes, so to speak, by the late Major 
Ginter, and it offers in a concrete form some 
evidence of the wealth that is dally invested 
In tobacco, not merely in this country, either, 
for the Richmond factories are beginning to 
send their products to foreign lauds in iarge 
quantities. 

Richmond’s tobacco 
factories employ 3,500 

FOR WORKERS. 

are girls—some of them 
girls who have been married for twenty 
years and have families. The pay roll 
for these workers runs up to about 
$15,000 a week. Counting those in the 
city who are less directly engaged in the man¬ 
ufacture—the yardmen, truckmen, . handlers, 
helpers and so on—it is claimed that those in¬ 
habitants who live on tobacco number not less 
than 5,000. The organization of the various 
tobacco companies Ip'.o a trust eight or nine 


LOW WAGES 


years ago has not affected wages or labor, 
so nearly as can be learned, while it has in¬ 
creased business and has compelled an expan¬ 
sion of trade It is claimed that positions 
are as secure under the trust as they were 
under the companies, and that, if anything, 
there is an upward tendency in wages. Fe¬ 
male labor is not very well paid, however, 
in any part of the world, and the average earn¬ 
ings in Richmond are probably as low as can 
be found in any of the great industrial cen¬ 
ters. In the .\Ilen & Giuter branch, where 
cigarettes are made and where 1,250 people are 
employed, 1,000 of them being women and a 
number of the others mere children, the aver¬ 
age wage is only $5.50 a week. 

This factory, which is in most respects a 
type of. all the tobacco factories of Virginia 
and Maryland, is well conducted, from the 
business point of view, and there are no in¬ 
dications of discontent among the operatives. 
The reasons for this lie partly in the fact that 
while the employes are expected to be clean¬ 
ly and self-respecting, they are not required 
to dress as well as shop girls, who work longer 
hours and make less money. .4.gain, Richmond 
is a cheap city, with moderate cost of living 
and low rents. It is not a town that is so 
prolific in maddening amusements that one 
is inclined to go out and spend the whole 
$5.50 in one evening. But, chiefly, the com¬ 
pany makes an effort to secure only young 
women of good character in its shops, and in 
doing this it exercises a plain business sense, 
lor the moral are the steady and industrious, 
and have the best incitement to make as 
much as possible by the labor of their hands. 
When it finds or has reason to suspect that 
any one of the girls is not what she should 
be, or could be, a way is found to drop her 
quietly from the lists. 

The best testimony concerning the good 
character of the cigarette girls in Richmond 
comes from the chief of police in that city. 
Says he: “I have been on the force now lor 
about thirty-five years, and in all that time 



















42 


THE TOBACCO TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


not one of these girls has ever been arrested. 
And I have good reason to know something 
about the character of working women In this 
town, as you may suppose, for all those who 
are walking the streets are listed in this de¬ 
partment and we keep pretty clase track of 
them. The girls in the factories never make 
trouble, and a good many of them will com¬ 
pare in appearance and intelligence with the 
girls of any of our city families.” And this 
Is true, certainly so far as appearance is con¬ 
cerned, for many of them have beauty and 
style. Of course, there are hundreds who 


that they turn out better cigars in places 
where they do not smoke, and In so large an 
establishment as any of the leading Richmond 
factories smoking is rigorously prohibited, 
for cautionary reasons. Not a man, woman, 
girl or child smokes in any of the cigarette 
or cheroot shops, and should any one light 
a cigar, cigarette or pipe he or she would 
probably be discharged on the spot. 

The precautions against Are are many and 
complete. Even if a company is indifferent to 
the safety of its employes it is bound to pro¬ 
tect its stock. Hence there are automatic 



THE ALLEN & GINTER WORKS. 


have no. claim to either, and nearly all 
of them have that little touch of the shop 
that comes to every woman who is forced to 
engage in a manual industry. There is not 
much attempt at dress, yet as you see them 
going to or leaving their work you notice that 
their attire is commonly more neat and 
tasteful than, among the factory girls in 
Northern cities, and you wonder how it is that 
they keep such brilliant complexions, in spite 
of their long days in rooms charged with the 
dust and odor of an herb that is' commonly 
unpleasing to women, and that in the form 
which one finds in the shops is not invaria¬ 
bly agreeable even to hardened smokers. 


GIRLS DON’T 
USE TOBACCO. 


The girls say they are 
often disagreeably af¬ 
fected by the dust 
and the smell when 
they begin work, and for a couple of days are 
liable to coughing spells and to headaches, 
but after that they do not mind it. One re¬ 
markable assurance that the employers make 
is that few if any of them acquire any fond¬ 
ness for tobacco because they work in it, and 
although girls of a class not commonly re¬ 
ferred to in polite society do smoke, and 
even some society women pretend to like 
cigarettes, these girls who make the 
cigarettes do not use them after they are 
made. There are no yellow teeth and yellow 
finger tips among them, save where the 
fingers may be slightly discolored from 
rolU-'g or handling the leaf. This is all differ¬ 
ent irom the way of men who make cigars. 
They smoke like furnaces in some places, and 
are allowed a certain number of cigars every 
day for their own consumption. It is probable 


sprinklers, and reservoirs, and fire hose, and 
grenades, and a special fire engine for the 
subjugation of any fiames that might be 
started through accident. The factories are 
of brick and are soundly constructed, but 
carelessness in the handling of matches or 
stumps by smokers might cause a trouble¬ 
some fire in rooms where tons of pasteboard 
and wooden boxes are made or stored. For 
nearly everything used in the packing and 
shipment as well as in the making of the 
cigarettes is contrived on the premises. 

Much of the leaf used in the Allen & Ginter 
works—this name survives, though Mr. Allen 
long ago sold out and Major Ginter is dead— 
is raised in Virginia, but tons of it come from 
the Northern farms, especially from, the State 
of New York, which produces a smokable 
quality of tobacco in these days. It is usu¬ 
ally rather light in color and not heavy in 
respect of the nicotine it contains. More of 
it can be smoked than of Havana tobacco; 
that is, of the real Havana, which is. dark, has 
a considerable amount of oil in it and is 
hardly known in the United States at present. 

The leaf arrives in Richmond in rather 
loosely tied bundles, the stems of twenty or 
thirty leaves being tied together. Boxes of 
these leaves are hoisted to the top floor of 
the factory, where 120 negroes are at work, 
and they will receive a cent a pound for 
stripping them, or pulling out the center 
vein or stem. The man gives a little pull 
at the base of the leaf and draws out this 
stem for a couple of Inches; then, deftly 
wrapping the leaf around his left hand, he 
continues to pull with his right, and in no 
time the stem is out and is flung Into a box 


beside him, to be shipped away for use as 
fertilizer and insecticide. For great quanti¬ 
ties of what used to be waste are now em¬ 
ployed in the industries and arts, and in some 
cases the by-product, as it is called, is of al¬ 
most as much importance as the more crude 
and bulky material from which it is derived. 

As you climb the stairs toward the strip¬ 
ping room you hear a mighty chorus rising, 
ever louder and clearer, and as you arrive in 
the long hall you are thrilled by the deep 
voices of a hundred negroes united in 
My country, ’tis of thee. 

Sweet land of liberty. 


Ah, what a meaning 

NEGROES SING 
AT THEIR WORK. 


in this, of all songs, 
when it is black men 
who sing it, and who 
could not have sung 
it forty years ago 
unless in mockery. Then the hands so busy 
would have been the hands of slaves. You 
stand apart for a while in the concealment of 
a pile of boxes and listen to the music. But 
there is no fear of interrupting. The men do 
not look up. They are all as busy as other 
people who work in silence. It is simply their 
way to sing at their toll. They did it when 
they gathered cotton in the fields. They will 
do it, let us hope, when higher alms and en¬ 
larged capacity put places of higher responsi¬ 
bility at their command. Song is the token 
of a light heart and these people sing because 
they have not learned to feel that life is a 
trial and a care and that the world is a vale 
of tears made to echo to the complaints of 
those who, willy nilly, have been brought into 
it. 


The cheerfulness of the Southern darkey is 
based on a splendid physical health. As an 
animal he has few equals and no superiors. 
Ambition does not keep him from his sleep, 
the cares of wealth and place do not seam his 
brow with wrinkles, even family cares weigh 
so lightly that he hardly feels them, and, in¬ 
deed, he now and then throws them aside it 
they threaten to press heavily. He goes 
through life as lightly as he can and therein 
is a philosopher. His willingness to idle and 
sing when he might as easily work have dis¬ 
credited him in the eyes of some of his light 
colored associates, yet nobody who lives with 
him for a time but has a kindly feeling for 
him; he is so ingenuous, so child-like, con¬ 
tent with so little, so full, yet unconscious 
of his humor; so good natured, so wanting in 
revengefulness or remorse. And here we see 
him at his best; industrious because he must 
be, and accepting with song this dispensa¬ 
tion of work as the only alternative, if a 
dreadful one, from starvation. 

The strippers are encouraged to sing be¬ 
cause it has been found that they work 
longer and harder for it. They do not stop 
to consider what shall be sung, nor to feel 
around for the key. Some big voiced fel¬ 
low strikes up a camp meeting hymn or a 
church chant—for In their music they are by 
choice and nearly always religious; there is 
little or no rag time singing in the shops— 
and in a few seconds the tenors and basses 
have found their respective parts, though 
they are mixed together as to their places, 
and the walls ring with music. And in its 
way it Is fine music, too. These fellows have 
voices of singular power, the basses, especial¬ 
ly, having a noble depth and range. To hear 
them rolling out a double b flat in a psalm 
is to hear something worth while, and the 
singing in itself is worth the trip to Rich¬ 
mond. And their throats never tire. They 
sing in this way for hour after hour, for 
pure Icve of the music, and their work is 
the lighter because of it. Why can’t the 
rest of us learn to do that? It is said and 
with a good deal of truth that the American 














































































THE TOBACCO TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


43 


ia the only man who never sings or whistles 
at his tasks. He is the only one who is so 
Imbued with the belief that pleasure Is 
against the established order that _he puts 
off all his fun until he has reached the next 
world and does not take time even to whistle 
in this one. To be sure, with shortening 
hours and Increasing sense he is outgrowing 
that notion, but he might learn a lesson in 
the Richmond tobacco factories, 
om r" 11 1 “ some of the cl* 

SOME TOILERS gar works in Cuba 

EMPLOY READERS/”^ 

where Spanish or a 
mongrel blood predominates, the people do not 
sing, but they have an interesting substitute 


for music in readings. The workers club to¬ 
gether or the employer pays the cost for the 
hiring of a reader. Such a functionary 
would be impossible In the big spaces and 
the noisy surroundings of a Virginia factory, 
with machinery punching and hissing and 
rumbling under him and elevators creaking 
and people passing to and fro; but in the 
more composed companies that wrap the real 
Havanas we hear about In Cuba, the reader 
makes his voice easily heard. He gives a 
summary of the morning news from the 
papers and then takes up popular literature— 


among them, leads to sky larking. Some 
girl will strain her voice a little beyond the 
normal In order to make a funny effect, or 
she will Introduce home made words into the 
verse, or she will poke the ribs of her neigh¬ 
bor in order to make her shriek and inter¬ 
rupt the music, and when the boss finds that 
matters are getting into such a state that 
the work is going to be stopped for a romp 
he orders all the singing to cease, and the 
hands are steady once more. But the girls 
do sing, all the same, and sometimes sing 
all day. They prefer hymns as the negroes 
do, and they sing -with good voices. 

On pay mornings the cigarette girls arrive 
in their best bibs and tuckers, and the ne¬ 
groes are startling in their fawn colored 
overcoats, scarlet ties and shining shoes. 
There is an obvious self complacency about 
the establishment then. The arrival of a 
person with a camera does not excite alarm. 
As to the negroes a camera is not commonly 
an Implement to excite fear, although It is 
hard to get some of those miracles of grin¬ 
ning raggedness in the lower courts and al¬ 
leys to hold still if a photographer is around. 
If they can gain the moral support of num¬ 
bers th&y will be taken gladly. With the 
girls it is otherwise. If a camera is pointed 
at them, playfully, when they are lolling out 



TOBACCO FACTORIES, RICHMOND. 


novels, poems, bits of history or description, 
and the strippers and wrappers listen as 
they work. Imagine the throat of an av¬ 
erage American after reading aloud all day 
In a big room filled with tobacco dust! Why, 
a man who could do that could play Mac¬ 
beth. 

Now, it Is an odd fact that while the darkles 
are encouraged to sing as much as they like 
it is sometimes necessary to stop the white 
girls from doing so. It has been found that 
Binging, instead of promoting steadiness 


of the windows at the noon hour, there is a 
flutter and a shriek, and the windows are va¬ 
cated. That is because they are not ar¬ 
rayed in their store clothes. 

These girls are employed in making sev¬ 
enty-five or eighty kinds of cigarettes for 
markets in various parts of the country and 
the world, London showing a preference for 
one sort. New York for another, and so on. 
They are on piece work, wherever such an 
arrangement is possible, and that has been 
found to be the most satisfactory in almost 


every industry, alike to employers and em¬ 
ployed; as It certainly is the fairest, provided 
the quality of the work is kept at the best. 
Despite the fact that a thousand of the wom¬ 
en are employed in the principal shop of the 
Allen & Glnter branch there is no crowding 
in any department, for this branch has over 
200,000 feet of floor space beside annexes and 
yard room. There is no garden, however, no 
play ground or recreation room, no lawn or 
grass plat, no attempt to beautify or brighten 
the big, bare looking factories that stand so 
square against the street. 


■ The South Is new, 

NOTHING DONE tut U is also con- 

FOR EMPLOYES. “‘ 7 - ‘“- 

dustrial experiments 
that pay so high a rate of interest on the 
Investment in some of the Northern cities 
have not been heard of there. In this re¬ 
spect it must not be supposed that the to¬ 
bacco manufacturers are singular. If noth¬ 
ing is done for their employes in the way of 
schools, libraries, rest rooms, restaurants, 
baths, holidays, picnics and so on It Is be¬ 
cause none of these innovations has been 
Introduced below Mason and Dixon’s line, and 
the propoeltlon to Introduce them would be 
received—at first— with a shout of derision. 
And possibly the colored help might not 
know how to take these concessions. 


To go back to the colored people, singing 
at their work, the tobacco leaves they strip 
have to be drawn or sweated. As the leaves 
arrive in a brittle state of dryness they could 
not be handled without crumbling to pieces, 
so they are cased or dipped in troughs and 
booked or bent for stretching smooth, in or¬ 
der to present a smooth surface for wrappers. 
As tobacco for cigarettes costs from 35 to 50 
cents a pound it is evident that there must 
be no carelessness. In this room the odor 
of the weed is strongest and bitea the nose 
most sharply, although there is less dust 
than in some of the places where machinery 
is employed. It might be supposed that where 
the crude leaf was used in such quantities 
and where negroes of alleged predatory in¬ 
stincts are employed that there would be 
more or less pilfering, but It is denied that 
such is the case. On the contrary the em¬ 
ployes of all sorts and all races are declared 
to be as faithful as the average, if not a lit¬ 
tle more so. 


After passing from the hands of the colored 
strippers the tobacco goes below stairs into a 
casing machine in which 20,000 pounds of to¬ 
bacco are moiled a day. It is a cylinder four¬ 
teen feet long and a yard in diameter, through 
which jets of steam are poured while the 
tobacco is rolled over and over In its revo¬ 
lutions. This makes the leaf pliable. A sim¬ 
ilar cylinder rolls It again and partially driee 
it before it is delivered to the choppers. These 
choppers are machines fed with the massed 
leaves by young men. An endless belt car¬ 
ries the tobacco under knives that fall eight 
or ten strokes to the second and little boys 
of ten or a dozen years scrape it into boxes 
and carry It away after this hashing process, 
often venturing their fingers into what seems 
to the unused observer a perilous closeness 
to the blades. Another cylinder now receives 
and shakes it so that it becomes light and 
fluffy and can be readily packed into the cig¬ 
arettes, for it Is steam and iron that does 
most of the work, and only with the help 
of these two giants could the branch turn out 
4,000,000 cigarettes daily. 

In making all-tobacco cigarettes a girl places 
a bit of leaf under a die, which strikes out 
a section of the right size for a wrapper, car¬ 
ries it down on an endless band into a myiM 







































44 


THE TOBACCO TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


terious depth, where fingers of steel clutch 
It and wrap it around a pinch of chopped 
tobacco and throw it into a box. Girls seated 
near the machine take up the cigarettes in 
handfuls and rapidly scan them—they must 
be quick for this instrument is turning out 
three boxes of cigarettes to the minute—as¬ 
sorting them according to their color, into 
grades and throwing out all the broken and 
Imperfectly wrapped pieces. The broken ones 
are sent back to the chopping room. There 
are three grades of cigarettes, going accord¬ 
ing to color; Colorado, colorado-maduro and 



CIGARETTE GIRLS. 


xnaduro. These divisions are largely fanciful, 
the taste of the tobacco varying slightly if 
at all, but customers prefer their boxes to be 
ef one color, so they are humored. As a mat¬ 
ter of fact a single plant will produce several 
shades, the farther down on the plant it 
grows, the darker being the leaf, as a rule. 

The paper cigarettes emerge from a dif¬ 
ferent sort of machine of which there are 
thirteen, each putting out 3,500 boxes an 
hour. It suggests a newspaper press, on a 
small scale, the roll of paper, in this case be¬ 
ing rice paper from Paris, which comes in 
spools 60,000 inches long. The chopped to¬ 
bacco is fed into the machine and falls into 
the paper just where it narrows on entering 
a tube that rolls it entirely around the to¬ 
bacco and gums it from a little reservoir, by 
means of a wheel with its rim slightly 
smeared with paste, and in a moment the 
cigarette emerges. It it were not stopped by 
a cutter this cigarette would reach across 
the James River, for it emerges in a con¬ 
tinuous roll; but the cutter chops it into reg¬ 
ulation lengths, at the rate of 150,000 a day, 
and feeds the product into a metal box. 
Here again an inspection follows, the girls 
plucking the cigarettes up in handfuls and 
with surprising quickness throwing out those 
that are broken, imperfectly filled or Incom¬ 
pletely pasted. In another grade of cigar¬ 
ettes the tobacco is only rough rolled and 
the filling and pasting are finished by hand. 
In the cheroot factory, in a separate building, 
the work is entirely done by hand. Some 
new cigarettes, with wrappers of native leaf, 
are assorted according to color by girls w’ho 
Bit at a long table, each under a strong 
though neutral light, in order that there may 
be no mistake, and that no Colorado may 
be misplaced with a maduro, albeit with his 
•yes shut the smoker would probably not 



know the difference. These cigarettes are 
put up in curved tin boxes that are squeezed 
tightly in a press before shipment. 

II o rvrt HsrtOT Then there are the 

GIRLS DO MOST boxing departments 
OF THE WORK. where girls pack away 

bunches of ten and 
twenty cigarettes for English consump¬ 
tion, and other departments w-here the 
girls label the packs and where pack¬ 
ets and boxes are put together. Boys 
are employed here to some extent in 
feeding the pasteboard into a machine 
that crimps and bends it, and into other 
macl»nes that catch the corners together, 
for machinery appears to do almost every¬ 
thing in these days, while the boys serve it 
and chew gum. Each business concern, also, 
is becoming more and more self centered, 
for although this is just a tobacco factory, 
according to the signs, it is also a wood box 
factory, a pasteboard box factory, a print¬ 
ing shop and a few other things. It has its 
own machine shop, and it has one room in 
which the revenue stamps are applied to the 
boxes. This is a job that still remains for 
hands, for stamps cost money and it would 
not do to give them over to a machine that 
might tear them. Allen & Ginter pay to the 
United States government $4,500 a day for 
stamps. The-boxes are rather too many for 
the government to examine, or even to 
count; so it keeps tab on the tobacco men 
by examining their accounts, and it follows 
pretty closely the output and the ingo of to¬ 
bacco. A report has to be made to the gov¬ 
ernment daily, and if there was a marked 
discrepancy between the number of shipments 
and the number of stamps bought to cover 
the presumptive shipments for that day. 


they were a distinctly Intellectual company. 
.4s a matter of fact, they refuse to be much 
interested in books. Possibly they are too 
tired when they go home at night, especially 
if they have been working overtime—a thing 
they like to do because it means a substantial 
Increase in their pay. Several attempts have 
been made to establish reading rooms and 
libraries in Richmond, but the results are 
small in comparison with those achieved in 
many New England villages. The religious 
is stronger than the literary or scholastic in¬ 
fluence. Before the war the prominent citi¬ 
zen owned his library and now that he Is r 
less prominent citizen it has not occurred t.i 
him to unite with other citizens and share 
his books with the public. But the preacher 
and the missionary are active, and good 
women take a motherly Interest in these girls. 
They gather them into social and religious 
meetings; they have established a creche for 
their mothers and married sisters (15 per 
cent, of the women in the factories are mar¬ 
ried); they do their best service, at least tbeir 
most tangible and immediate one, in provid¬ 
ing food at cost price to the girls when they 
are detained in the factories by overtime 
work. 

In apportioning the stock to be converted 
into cheroots the bosses give out a certain 
quantity which the girl is expected to wrap 
before she leaves for the night. Usually the 
cheroots are turned in, in batches of a hun¬ 
dred, and if she receives a bundle late in 
the afternoon it will be correspondingly late 
before she leaves. In such' an instance she 
halls the arrival of the mission agent with 
a wagon containing suppers or lunches ar¬ 
ranged on metal trays and kept hot until the 
arrival at the factory. There is soup, and 


NEGRO CABINS NEAR THE TOBACCO FACTORIES. 


the revenue agent w'ould be around to In¬ 
quire. 

The statement of good morals in the tobac¬ 
co factories can be supplemented with a fair¬ 
ly satisfying report as to Intelligence. Most 
if not all of the girls have had a common 
school education and some of them, the 
daughters of families ruined by the war, are 
of superior breeding. A woman who has in¬ 
terested herself in their welfare says it is 
the idea of most of them to work only till 
they can marry. Perhaps the fair maids of 
Richmond are not alone in this. It would be 
Idealizing the cigarette makers to say that 


there are vegetables, sometimes a stew, and 
always an abundance of sweet stuff, pies, 
puddings, custards, cake, ice cream, candy, 
with milk, coffee and tea, and the average 
cost of the dishes is 5 cents each. 


LITTLE GAINED 
BY OVERTIME. 


In the over time work 
little more Is accom¬ 
plished than in the 
usual hours. There is 
a certain amount of accomplishment possible 
in the human being, and although emergen¬ 
cies can be met by temporarily increased out¬ 
put, the strain tells in a little while and the 
production falls away again until the average 















































































THE TOBACCO TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


45 


Is once more reached. In the cheroot fac¬ 
tories It is said that although overtime is 
usually offered on Tuesday and Thursday eve¬ 
nings the results, as to Increase in quantity, 
are slight. Sometimes the girls are delayed 
by trouble with the stock, which may be 
sandy, or gummy, or imperfectly cured. Work 
is never done on Sunday, nor is it ever kept 
up all night. The hours are from 7:15 A. M. 
to 6 P. M., with half an hour for lunch at 
noon, but on Saturday the shops close at 


lapher and typewriter. A young woman 
who writes shorthand and does typewriting 
makes about $8 a week in Richmond; but al¬ 
though this is 12.50 better than the average 
wage of a cigarette girl, yet a factory hand 
who thoroughly undertsands her business 
and is steady in her application to it, can 
make $9 a week—in some cases she earns 
$10—and one advantage, in that case, over 
the typewriter is that she can live more 
humbly and dress more plainly without oc¬ 



WHITE FOLKS’ TENEMENTS NEAR THE CIGARETTE FACTORIES. 


2:30. This arrangement of hours is the choice 
of the workers themselves. 

There are no organizations among the to¬ 
bacco workers, as such. Whatever societies 
they belong to—charitable, progressive, and 
so on—are outside matters. The company 
makes a Christmas distribution of candy 
among the girls, and during the life of Major 
Glnter every employe had a Christmas tur¬ 
key. There was once a base ball club, but 
its members were mostly clerks. As to trades 
unions, they are practically unknown. The 
mechanica, employed in the factories in 
mending or installing machines, number 
barely three per cent, of the working force 
and they are the only ones who have been 
enlisted in the labor unions. An attempt is 
now being made, however, to assemble the 
girls and others in a Tobacco Workers’ Union 
but progress in that direction is said to be 
mournfully slow. 

There was a strike in the shops not long 
ago, caused by the oppressions of a certain 
foreman and by some severity in docking, 
and although it failed it was followed by 
concessions and the girls were taken back 
on the promise that they would engage in no 
more disturbances. This strike was not 
general, and was easily settled, for every 
branch controls its own affairs almost as 
perfectly as it did before the formation of 
the trust. 

The girls are nearly all Americans. Indeed 
the foreign invasion of the South has hardly 
more than begun. While many are the 
daughters of local families, hundreds come 
in from the country districts roundabout, 
from the poor little* sandy farms, or the more 
pretentious ones that cost their owners still 
more every year; and they are glad of the 
poor w*age they can earn in the tobacco fac¬ 
tories—yet, not such a poor wage, either, 
as compared with that of girls who stand be¬ 
hind counters in the dry goods shops, and 
nearly as good as the earning of the stenog- 


casioning reproof, even from her own sense 
of the fitness of things. 

itfitirv K While most of these 

LIVING CHEAP glrls live with their pa¬ 
rents or with married 
relatives, whom they 
help to support, and in certain instances en¬ 
tirely support, the new arrivals board, and 
for $12 a month they can get fair accommo¬ 
dations with a room better than the usual 
hall bedrooom, that costs $3 to $5 a week, 


IN RICHMOND. 


the usual slight fee that surely does not 
cover the expense. It is a resort for self 
supporting women, and in order that all may 
have their outing, no one of them can stay 
more than three weeks. Board is only $2 a 
week, and a round trip ticket, covering 239 
miles of travel, is sold to the tobacco w'orkers 
for $2.30, with 20 cents extra if a trunk is to 
be hauled from the station. An entire fort¬ 
night’s vacation. Including fares, costs a 
girl, therefore, only $C.50, or less than one 
pays in a day at some modern hotels. The 
Young Women’s Christian Association of 
Richmond gives board to a number of these 
workers in its roomy house for $2 a week, 
with an extra charge for washing and fuel, 
but in order to give such rates as these the 
girls are required to share one room among 
four. They must give recommendations as 
to character, or they are not admitted. There 
is some complaint among the poorer girls 
because places are sought in the factories 
by girls whose families are comparatively 
well to do, and who desire the work in 
order that they may spend the profits on 
dress, in theater tickets and so on, but all 
alike are held strictly to their work, and if 
they are not in their places at 7:25, they are 
shut out for the day. During the two weeks 
in which they learn their trade they receive 
no remuneration, and probably do not earn 
any, for they are likely to spoil more to¬ 
bacco than they can put into salable form. 

The health of the operatives appears to be 
generally good, for most of them are young. 
Headaches are not uncommon among them, 
and in looking over a room in which many 
are at work a dozen or more will be seen 
with heads wrapped in towels and more 
will wear newspaper caps and shades. It 
is possible, however, that some of these sup¬ 
posed sufferers are merely keeping their 
bangs in order. A more common trouble is 
faintness and oppression, owing to the heat 
in winter, for the rooms are kept at a baking 
temperature and the girls who are nearest to 
the steam pipes complain now and then of 
vertigo. 

Virginia lacks a child labor and a truancy 
law; hence, the presence of dozens of cbil« 



TOBACCO STRIPPERS ALL NEGROES. 


in New York, without anything to eat. While 
the fare in the little two story boarding 
houses in the eastern part of Richmond is not 
rich, it usually includes a daily supply of 
meat and is wholesome. The girls all a_ ..r 
well nourished. 

No vacations are given, but any girl may 
have a fortnight of liberty in the summer at 
her own expense, and there is to be seen 
pasted on the walls of some of the rooms a 
notice of a place in the Blue Mountains, near 
Greenwood, Va., known as the Summer Rest, 
to which they are welcomed on payment of 


dren of almost tender years in some of the 
simpler employments. Some of these little 
people are not regularly employed, to be 
sure, but work on Saturdays or for a few 
hours of an afternoon, in order to earn 
money enough to go to the circus or the 
theater. They can make half a dollar a day 
at unskilled work, and in labor calling for 
spryness or aptness can make $3.50 or $4 a 
week. When of larger growth they can earn 
a dollar a day as laborers. There are sev¬ 
eral entire families employed in the factories 
and they earn from $18 to $24 a week. If 




































































































’ 46 


THE TOBACCO TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


any employe is hurt In doing his or her 
■work the company sends the sufferer to a 
hospital, and the wages continue until the 
work is resumed. 


Not more than 10 or 

NOT EAGER 12 per cent, of the to- 

FOR EDUCATI0N.'^^®‘=° workers save 
money, or try to do so, 
In which respect they differ radically and 
racially from most of the foreigners who have 
come to America within the last twenty years. 
Nor do they always show in youth the eager¬ 
ness to obtain an education that some of the 
Huns and Polacks display, though it is claim¬ 
ed that the tobacco factories contribute their 
Quota to the night classes of the Virginia Me¬ 
chanics’ Institute, which gives practically 
free instruction in the three Rs, algebra, ge¬ 
ometry, trigonometry, applied mechanics, 
bookkeeping, free hand, mechanical and archi¬ 
tectural drawing, physios, chemistry, electric¬ 
ity and modeling. According to an official 
of the city the “dam drunken daddies” are re¬ 
sponsible for sending children to work, and 
he says that at least forty drunkards in Rich¬ 
mond are living on the meager earnings of 
little boys and girls. But this unhappy fact 
pertains to every town. 

In view of the dislike in which the negro is 
held in parts of the South, it is surprising to 
discover that in the tobacco factories, at least, 
the colored people have more thrift than some 
Of the whites. During the hard times of half 


a dozen years ago they maintained their char¬ 
itable organizations, and their bank—the 
True Reformers’ Association Bank—was the 
only one in Richmond which paid cash over 
its counter in the panic of ’93. Seventy per 
cent, of the negroes now read and write, and 
10 per cent, of the colored graduates of the 
grammar school go to high school, the per¬ 
centage of w'hite pupils being but one or two 
higher. Yet there are not wanting people who 
say that education is the ruin of the negro, 
thatassoon as he can read and figure he is too 
smart to work, and that having lifted himself 
above his class he is no more possible among 
white people than when he wore rags and 
napped on the sunny corners of the streets. 
It is still maintained that he inclines to dis¬ 
honesty, and that he will go at night to some 
cook of his blood or acquaintance and accept 
at her hands groceries and butcher’s stuff 
that belong to her employer. 

The negroes enjoy parading in the streets, 
and they have many secret societies. Said 
a prominent man of the city. "We had our 
turn wearing ribbons and regalia and now 
the niggers, who are apish, are taking theirs. 
They like nothing so much as to turn out 
all covered with dingle dangles. We have 
one company here known os ‘The Rising Suns 
of Ham,’ and they gave an order to a local 
sign painter to get up a banner for them. 
What do you think he did? Painted a sun 
rising over a big pork ham! And the fellows 


did not see the joke of, it, either. They pa¬ 
raded.” 

An average rent in the Industrial quarters 
of Richmond is $10 to $12 a month. This se¬ 
cures a six room house. But the negroes live 
anywhere and anyhow, spending much money 
as they do not save in Saturday night fire 
water and in gorgeous raiment. When they 
do work, however, they work hard and make 
fair wages. Taken in the mass the tobacco 
workers of Richmond are held to be the best in 
that city, morally, 4f not in other respects, and 
superior to those of Baltimore in education and 
appearance. The great majority of them are 
Baptists, and the Wednesday night meetings 
are held to be their principal dissipation. This 
is putting it rather strong, but “’ligion” 
means more to the negroes at all events than 
it does to the white people, especially of the 
North, and when they begin to “seek,” all 
other interests give way. 

Although industrial experiments have not 
been in the line of the company’s activities, 
an interesting one was recently undertaken in 
the offer of prizes for the best and fastest 
work among the packers, rollers and bunch 
breakers: Four tailor made suits, four fur 
collars and four pairs of shoes. The compe¬ 
tition lasted for three weeks and excited an 
eager interest. One fluffy haired, liquid 
eyed demoiselle declared that she would en¬ 
gage in no such rivalry. “ ’Deed and 'deed 
I’ll not. I value my health too much,” she 
said. She was making $6 a week and was 
satisfied with that. 


THE SUGAR 


TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


If. as one physician says, manufactured 
sugar is a poison, then there is another count 
against the sugar trust. But another medico 
says it isn’t poison; that it is a useful food, 
and that the craving of children for it is natu¬ 
ral. He allows that it is best in its natural 
lorm of fruit juice, but when you cannot get 
fruit he would permit the younkers to eat 
candy. 

The charge that lies against the sugar 
makers, in case the first physician is right, 
is that by cheapening their merchandise they 
have popularized it to an inordinate degree. 
The American has a sweet tooth that is big¬ 
ger than his wisdom tooth, and when it de¬ 
cays and has to be filled it gives him a good 
deal of trouble. With sugar at a dollar a 
pound there would be a general refraining 
from it. And that is what it used to be. 

They allege that when the Dutch occupied 
the ground where most of our sugar is now 
made it was the custom to hang a large lump 
of this substance by a string from the ceiling 
over the middle of the table, and it was thus 
swung from hand to hand during tea drinking. 
The custom was to take a nibble, and while 
the taste of it was in the mouth to swallow 
the tea. In those times sugar was commonly 
made in loaves, of cone shape, and was pound¬ 
ed up in sizes to suit. A person who could 
afford all the sugar he wanted was looked upon 
with respect, as in our days we look upon a 
man who keeps an automobile, or takes ice. 
According to one chronicler, w^hose veracity 
should not be doubted, because be is dead— 
and de mortuis nil desperandum—there was 
a colonial dame with whom the father of his 
country one day took supper. When she pour- 
Vl the tea she loaded the General’s cup with 
•ugar. After the second spoonful he cried 


out in protest, but she continued to shovel it 
in, remarking, with a well bred smile; 

“Oh, we have plenty, and nothing in this 
house is too good for General Washington.” 

A vision of the present state of the sugar 
industry In those times would have been re¬ 
garded as freakish and fantastic in a high 
degree. Our grandfathers in their cocked hats 
and our grandmothers in their ruffles and fur¬ 
belows could have had no more notion of 
what this century had in store, in that man¬ 
ufacture, than they could have had of steam 
engines and electric lighting. In giving em¬ 
ployment to many jaws it also supplies work 
to many hands and fatly lines many purses. 
The huge refineries where most of the sugar 
eaten in the United States is made occupy 
blocks on the East River front of Brook¬ 
lyn. They tower above the water and the 
streets like Rhenish castles on their craggy 
pedestals, and at night are more impressive 
than those ruins, especially when they are 
running on full time and are lighted from top 
to bottom, and steam and smoke and sparks 
are pouring from their pipes and chimneys. 
Even Brooklynites, returning from the opera, 
have been known to leave the cabin of the 
ferryboat and go out on deck to see the spec¬ 
tacle, and people from other villages concede 
that the show is better than a theater. Big 
Industries all have their romantic and pic¬ 
torial aspect, which is obvious to everyone, 
unless he works in them, or passes them daily, 
and to the Brooklynite the monster refineries 
are merely obstructions to daylight, the team¬ 
ing about them is merely a hindrance to trol¬ 
ley traffic, and the smells that leak from them 
are trials to the flesh that conduce to a spirit 
of Christian resignation or an outbreak of 


nausea and wrath, according to the state of 
one’s nose and stomach and soul. 

I ADorOT nr largest sugar re- 

LA RGEST OF finery in the world is 

that of Havemeyer & 
Elder, which occupies 
five blocks of water front and several lots of 
land beside, to say nothing of the associated 
structures—the barrel shops, the stables, the 
railroad tracks, floats, piers and sheds and 
the coffee roasting plant; for it need hardly 
be told to a generation eager for Information 
which may damage a trust, that the big sugar 
company has gone into the coffee trade in 
order to punish a man who added a sugar 
branch to his coffee business, and that it is 
copying his methods by putting up its sugar 
in paper parcels specially labeled and guaran¬ 
teed. It is spending money liberally to ad¬ 
vertise its coffee, and its coffee department 
alone is a respectable industry. 

In securing a water front for their opera¬ 
tions the refiners effect a great economy, for 
not only do they ship the sugar directly on 
steamers and freight cars, but the raw mate¬ 
rial is brought to their doors from Pernam¬ 
buco. Manila, Hawaii, Cuba, Egypt and Java 
and poured into their melting pans a,fter a 
single handling, hardly thirty steps from the 
wharf where it is landed; their coal, too, is 
delivered at the doors of their boiler rooms 
on canal boats, and, what is of no slight con¬ 
sequence, they have plenty of water. It is not 
pretty to look at, is this water. It is salt, 
it is fouled with no end of city waste, and 
vulgar little boys bathe in it in summer; but 
it will put out fires and will cool vacuum 
pans. For this latter purpose no less than 
25,000,000 gallons a day are reauired. and they 


REFINERIES. 













THE SUGAR TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


47 


have to be pumped Into a room 120 feet above 
the street. The 142 boilers for the engines 
are fed with fresh water from the reservoirs, 
and the water bill, especially in these days of 
half empty reservoirs, would frighten anyone 
but a millionaire. Then there is an advantage 
in this water-side situation, also, in that the 
air is cooler, and if a breeze is blowing it will 
be felt here more readily than in the built up 
districts; for sugar making is a warm busi¬ 
ness, and men will dare pneumonia and sev¬ 
eral other kinds of death in order to cool off. 
When the air goes into the rooms they are 
safer than when they go out into the air. 

All the refineries, both those connected with 
the trust and the independent ones, except the 
recently constructed works of the Arbuckles, 
are in the part of Brooklyn that is called the 
Eastern District, because it is due north of 
the rest of the town. Foreigners who come 
here to see the Colorado Canyon and Yellow¬ 
stone Park seldom visit Williamsburgh, as 
it is likewise called—for it was once a muni¬ 
cipality of that name—but other foreigners, 
who do not intend to see the Colorado or the 
Y'ellowstone, not merely visit this section, but 


GERMAN IN TASTES. 


hospitable, considering that they are almost 
unanimously of the peasant class and poor. 

There is a wein- 

SUGARMAKERS stube and dis¬ 
tillery and beer 
garden wher¬ 
ever a gap in the tenements permits the in¬ 
sertion of one: there arc halls for dances and 
concerts in which one finds sanded floors and 
gaudy and impossible landscapes on the walls; 
at least half of the signs are in German, and 
every saloon has from one to a dozen placards 
in blue and red announcing the annual festi¬ 
val or ball or picnic or chowder party or ex¬ 
cursion or target shoot of the Gottfried Muth 
Association, or the Friederich Eckstein Asso¬ 
ciation, or associations named for Joseph 
Lederer, or Arnold Feder, or Carl Boehnleln, 
or Wilhelm Zuckert, or Emil Fassnacht, or 
the Swell Guys, or the Li Hung Chang Cote¬ 
rie, or the Jolly Fellows, or the Karcher 
Guard.' There are so many of these things 
that you wonder if the people ever sleep. But 
really there are more people than associa¬ 
tions. In the mass these Germans are a plod¬ 
ding, honest, Industrious, uncomplaining 
company. They are hearty drinkers, but ex¬ 


work with his muscles three hours a day. The 
Christian Pole is dull, not very shrewd or 
progressive, not invariably so honest as a bank 
cashier, but he is faithful to his family, gets 
drunk principally at weddings and funerals 
and christenings, hence, he likes to have 
those things happen as often as possible; 
lives miserably in order to save money, and is 
a good workman at any task that does not re¬ 
quire much skill or Intellect. In religion he 
is a Roman or Greek Catholic, and among the 
sugar workers it is pretty safe to say that a 
decided majority is Catholic also. The prin¬ 
cipal Catholic church in the German section 
is one of the largest and finest in the city. 
Till- * r\ original sugar 

THE PASSING reSners in Brooklyn— 

np THP IRIQM Havemeyers, the 

Ur inC inldn. Mollenhauers, the Mol- 

lers, the Siercks. the Donners, the Heikes— 
were Germans, it was natural that they should 
gather German workingmen about them. 
Thirty years ago the indoor men were almost 
all Germans, and the yard men, laborers and 
teamster; were Irish. The latter gave way 
before the Swedes, and for a time there w’ere 
many Danes in the refineries. Where these 



THE BIGGEST SUGAR REFINERY IN THE WORLD. 


they bring their pots, pans and mattresses 
and stay. 

“Dutchtown,” the region Included in the 
sixteenth and Twenty-seventh Wards, and 
spreading rapidly into the Fifteenth, Eight¬ 
eenth and Twenty-first, covers several square 
miles and is almost solidly German. It is here 
that the sugar makers, who are also German, 
elect to live. The Teutonic population of this 
district may be safely estimated at 200,000. 

The Sixteenth Ward, or typical German sec¬ 
tion, is the most densely peopled ward in the 
city, except one, and is as un-American as 
Cincinnati. Though it extends from one to 
three miles from the sugar houses, thousands 
of the workers choose it as their place of 
residence, because they feel at home among 
people of their own race and speech; they find 
here German shops and saloons, German is 
spoken everywhere, the churches are German, 
and it is no rare thing to see a man or woman 
in the costume of the German farmer in the 
streets, for the populace is constantly grow¬ 
ing through arrivals from over the sda. These 
Germans are a social people, and moderately 


cept whep they work in the breweries they are 
not guzzlers, and there is little drunkenness 
—a fact that our prohibition friends can 
never quite understand, considering that 
provocations are so plentiful. Though 
not a highly educated people, there are 
few iterates, and if they have a fault it is 
apt lo be an unregulated temper. When one 
of them is thoroughly turned against the 
world he commits suicide, but he generally 
recovers from it next day and feels better for 
months afterward. Few murders happen in 
Dutchtown, but it has more suicides than any 
other part of Brooklyn. 

There is a disturbing element in this na¬ 
tional harmony, however. The Polacks are 
getting in, and not only the Christian Poles, 
but the Polish Jews. Within a few years a 
ghetto has been formed in the heart of 
Dutchtown, with synagogues, sidewalk mar¬ 
kets and dirt, and the hearts of the neigh¬ 
bors shake within them. The Poles in the 
sugar refineries are as different from the Poles 
in the ghetto as an .American is different from 
a Frenchman. The Hebrew Pole will not work 
with his hands, unless it may be in a sweat¬ 
shop, Indoors. He will patiently sell shoe¬ 
strings for sixteen hours a day, rather than 


big, silent fellows came from, and where 
they wfent to, nobody appears to know. They 
looked like sailors, they did their work, and 
they disappeared. Twenty years ago there 
were still many Irish in the refineries and 
there were not a few associations of refinery 
men that seemed to have a political purpose. 
The Sugar House Guards, for example, used 
to parade just before election, and osten¬ 
sibly shoot at a target in some of the beer 
parks on the outskirts of Williamsburgh, but 
they first called on all the candidates who 
were up lor election to state and local offices 
and asked for money or kegs of beer for 
prizes, and they usually got something. These 
target companies would number seventy-five 
or a hundred, and would parade in blue 
shirts or jackets, black trousers and white 
caps. They do not parade any more and the 
candidate for the Legislature breathes more 
freely. Indeed, it would be hard to associate 
politics and sugar at present—at least, the 
kind of sugar they make from sugar cane. 
Our newly acquired Polacks may awaken to 
the importance of being represented in the 
Board of Aldermen a little later, but tut 


u 
















































































































48 


THE SUGAR TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


present they would rather have a few gal¬ 
lons of whisky than an office. 

That the Pole is feared by the Germans and 
Irish is obvious enough. You do not have 
to talk long with the people in the sugar 
districts to discover that. They know that 
he is willing to work for whatever he can 
get, and that he will do faithful service with¬ 
out attempt to change his lot through the 
service of labor unions—that is, until he is 
absolutely in control, and then you cannot 
say exactly what he will do, for out West 
he has shown himself to be capable of nasty 
conduct. Hence, when a reference is made 
to the Pole there is apt to be a pitying smile, 


with brick walls, steel frames and cement 
floors. Sugar is Inflammable stuff, and the 
ignition of sugar dust by an accidental flame 
produces so rapid a combustion that it is 
virtually an explosion. If it once gains head¬ 
way it is an almost hopeless task to stop a 
fire in a sugar room. The burning of the 
Havemeyer refinery, through the supposed 
carelessness of a mechanic, a number of years 
ago, was the most spectacular exhibition ever 
made in Brooklyn. The flames shot into the 
air for a hundred feet, and the building was 
reduced to a shell. Danger from this source 
has been reduced by the general introduction 
of incandescent electric lights, and the re- 


buminoids which are presently to be filtered 
out. Saw dust and bone black are pumped 
into a filter press and they gather the coag¬ 
ulated material, the filtering process being 
facilitated by straining through panels of 
jute and cotton which are removed as fast 
as they are clogged. In this room the aver¬ 
age temperature is 85 degrees, and the men 
wear only trousers and undershirt. Fans 
cool the air somewhat in summer. 

The older way of filtering through bags la 
also to be seen here, and the bags must be 
partly w'ashed by hand, whereas the cleaning 
of the cloth panels, which measure 92 by 40 
inches, and are used at the rate of 75 a day. 



SOME OF THE SUGAR MAKERS. 


or a shrug, or a little curl of the lip. But 
he has his friends, and they say that when 
he is immersed in a big American city he re¬ 
forms his ways, in a measure; even that he 
may one day become entirely civilized and 
wash as often as anybody. Indeed, his wife 
already washes the floor at New Year’s and 
sometimes changes the baby’s clothes. He is 
alleged to keep above the Italian In this 
matter of cleanliness. 

There is little about the manufacture of 
sugar that calls for skilled labor, and the 
work has been lightened and conditions modi¬ 
fied within fifteen or twenty years by im¬ 
proved machinery and by the Introduction of 
ventilators and blowing fans in the hottest 
rooms. The Pole has, therefore, arrived in 
time to benefit by these changes, though he 
would have taken the work just the same had 
it been twice as hot or hard. There is also 
an increasing safety in this industry, inas- 
ttiuch as the modefn buildings are fireproof. 


fineries are provided with ample hose, sprink¬ 
lers and other fire extinguishing apparatus. 

Business of the 

IMPROVEMENTS ON Havemeyer refln- 
OLD METHODS. ery begins at the 

piers, where tons 
of sugar of the kind usually known as high 
grade raw are landed from the steamers in 
bags and closely woven baskets. The Java¬ 
nese Insist on putting their sugar into these 
baskets, because the making of them gives 
employment to their women. The bags 
are opened on gratings in a big room on the 
ground, dim w'ith steam, and the sugar, of a 
yellow brown color and more or less lumpy, 
falls through a grating into three large melt¬ 
ing pans of a capacity of 60,000 pounds an 
hour. It is thence pumped to the eleventh 
floor of the next building and pours into 
twelve “blow-ups” which are stirred by air | 
Masts. This replaces the old treatment with ] 
beef blood to secure the coagulation of al- ' 


Is mostly done by machinery. Economy is 
used in all these processes, and these panels 
have the remnant of sugar soaked out of 
them before they go to the dryer. The floors, 
too, which become thick and rough with su¬ 
gar, are scraped, and even the piers, trodden 
though they are by hundreds of dirty feet, 
are periodically cleaned of the precious sap, 
which is refined free of all Impurity. 

As certain grades of sugar require more 
heat than others the strained product of 
those grades flows down to the re-heating 
station on the next floor where steam in pipes 
and melted sugar in vats raise the tempera¬ 
ture to nearly a hundred degrees. Now the 
liquor flows into char-filters on the next floor 
which hold 60.000 pounds of bone black. Gn- 
ti: recently a good deal of this bone dust has 
been made from the relics of the buffalo, 
which could be gathered by tons from the 
Western plains, where the animal murderers 
had left them; but this supply is practically 



































































































THE SUGAR TRUST AND ITS IDM'! !iKS, 


49 


at an end. The dust is afterward washed and 
burned clean, and this makes the peculiar 
sicklsh, almost nauseating odor that pertains 
to the refineries. 

The run begins with the best sugar and 
ends with the cheap grades. Samples are 
taken from time to time In bottles that are 
racked against the light, and the expert In 
charge has learned to detect differences in 
tint that a stranger hardly recognizes, and 
that mean nothing to him if he does. This 
determination of quality involves something 
of chemical and optical knowledge and is be- 


shake, in order to settle it as firmly as pos¬ 
sible, and a dozen of these barrels, dancing 
sullenly in the middle of the floor, make an 
odd sight. 


SAWED SUGAR 
IS THE BEST. 


Although loaf sugar is 
not often seen in the 
groceries, an immense 
quantity of it is made. 
It takes the cone shape because the metal 
mold narrows to a point at the bottom, 
in order to drain the mass while it is drying. 
Thousands of these molds are filled and stand 
for ten days in a room where the temperature 



UNDER THE REFINERY WALLS. 


•et with such difficulties that nobody tries 
to master it unless he is going into the busi¬ 
ness. In its next stage the sugar goes into a 
vast hall in which loom the huge, boiler like 
shapes of vacuum pans, which are not pans 
in the ordinary understanding. Each one of 
these great cylinders, against which the air 
Is pressing fifteen pounds to the square inch, 
holds 260 barrels, and the evaporation in 
vacuum requires a heat of 125 degrees instead 
of 212 degrees which would be necessary in 
the air—an item, when one is burning 600 
tons of coal a day. The length of the boil¬ 
ing determines the whiteness and firmness 
of the sugar, and in order to see how it is 
getting on, a proof stick is thrust into the 
mass. This is a metal rod. suggesting a 
cheese sampler, which fits so tightly into its 
socket that the air does not enter with it, 
and a notch cut into its side holds a spoon¬ 
ful of the sugar which is withdrawn with it. 
The man who studies these samples is, of 
course, another expert. 

The centrifugal machines which next re¬ 
ceive the sugar, still wet and heavy, are 
like boys’ tops, of metal, large and hollow. 
They revolve 700 times a minute and the 
sugar, thus driven up their sides, visibly 
pales while you watch it. for the syrup is 
being expelled in this vehement revolution 
through small holes in the metal. When 
the fill mass, as the sugar is now called, 
has been strained in this fashion, it is scraped 
out and lifted to the top of another house, 
to be dried of its remaining 2 per cent, of 
moisture in steam heated drums. After this 
the graded sugars are poured into bins and 
are ready for barreling. While each barrel 
is in process of filling it is rocked by a 
oiachlue with a sharp, jolting, thumping 


is 90 degrees, and where the men are attired 
in trousers and smiles. These men have to 
chip off the ragged crust that forms at the 
upper or open and broad end of the mold 
and pour on a syrup that will leave a smooth¬ 
er surface. The loaf, which weighs forty- 
eight pounds, is next dried in a so called 
stove at a temperature of 130 degrees. Not 
many of these loaves are sold. They 
are mostly sawed up on the premises into 
disks, sputtering blue light as they divide 
under the saw teeth, and are then subdivided 
into cubes or lumps. Lump sugar is also 
pressed from soft sugar in cube shaped dies, 
direct, but the sawed pieces are hardest and 
best. 

The processes are now over, the barrels and 
parcels are ready tor shipment, and the teams 
have only to back against the long platform 
that lines the street front of the buildings 
to receive their cargo; or, the barrels can be 
rolled directly down the dock to the waiting 
ships. In the final packing for grocery orders 
a number of girls find employment. They at¬ 
tend the machines that automatically pour, 
weigh and seal small packages of sugar, en¬ 
abling two girls to do the work recently done 
by eight, and do it more accurately. Some 
of the sugar is put up by them in bags and 
some in paper boxes. These girls have most 
of a room to themselves, a relatively clean 
and quiet apartment, with good dressing 
rooms and'free from heat. 

The sugar worker is an occupant of the 
tenements. Excepting a few mechanics, 
bosses or superintendents, few, if any, of 
the employes occupy houses of their own. 
The lowest price for a house large enough 
for an average family and convenient in 
location to the refineries is about }20 a 


I month, and unless he can sublet rooms or 
I induce his wife to take boarders this is an 
expense that cannot be borne by a man earn¬ 
ing from $9 to $15 a week. The tenements 
vary, of course, according to place and size, 
but an average of them will contain four 
rooms and will rent for $5.50 a month. It is 
rather close squeezing sometimes, for the 
sugar people are addicted to large families; 
but on the day when the sons grow up and find 
work for themselves the father can share 
the expense of a house with them or tumble 
them out of the old nest and stretch himself 
without any danger of smiting his progeny. 

Near the refineries the tenements and 
boarding houses are relics of a faded gentil¬ 
ity deplorable in their decay. There are 
mansions dating back to the period of Ionic 
columns, tall parlor windows and broad front 
steps, which are now faded, rusty, shabby, 
and are peopled by men and women who 
have come here too recently to know any¬ 
thing-of their'pa'' grandeurs. Hundreds of 
these homes that were formerly occupied by 
thriving merchants and' manufacturers or by 
well paia clerks, and other employes of New 
York houses are now boarding places for me¬ 
chanics and laborers. They are oftener com¬ 
monplace than mean, but they are rarely 
kept in repair, and as a majority of them are 
built of wood, their collapse is imminent. 

With your permis- 

A SAMPLE sion we will make 

BOARDING HOUSE. 

wooden house of two full stories, a 
basement and an attic that has little 
low windows, from which you can look 
only by going on your knees. There are 
four rooms in this attic, three better ones 
on the second floor, a parlor and mysterious 
apartments in which the landlady and her 
three sons bestow themselves on the first 
floor, and the basement contains a kitchen 
and dining room. When the house is full 
the dining room Is used for a bedroom and 
meals are served .n the kitchen. The board¬ 
ers who sit nearest the range are unhappy 
in summer. 

The landlady is fat, 50, and It would not 
be exactly just to call her fair, though 
she has a good natured face and is 
ruddy from her exercise in the culinary 
department. She is a widow and has 
never known prosperity since her hus¬ 
band died. She cannot afford a servant, 
but obliges her two younger boys to hel>- her 
s'weep, makJ the beds, wait on the table and 
do the errands. The oldest boy has a place 
as waiter in a fifteen cent restaurant and 
is doing well, in the maternal estima¬ 
tion. Her rates are $5 a week for board, but 
if one had the narrowest bedroom he could 
probably argue her into the giving of a slight 
discount. There is an extra charge for heat 
in winter, for the house has no furnace, and 
there are little sheet iron stoves in the larg¬ 
er rooms. Sugar men are frequent occupants 
of the smaller rooms and they have no way 
to heat them. Commonly they occupy them 
only when they -- ; asleep, and they probably 
take comfort In the coolness after the troplo 
temperature of thj refineries. 

The rooms are bare, except of a few prints 
and photographs that the boarders have put 
on the walls. The beds have a certain un¬ 
holy suggestiveness in their appearance. 
There are curtains of the cheapest cotton lace 
at the front windows, a faded carpet on the 
parlor floor, matting in the bedrooms and no 
gas, the bills for that luminant being a trifle 
too high. The lamps supplied are of that 
small, dim sort, that one finds in farm houses. 
There is no plumbing in the house except iti 

























































BO 


THE SUGAR TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


and back ot the kitchen, hence no running j oval table with its frayed and spotted table 
water in any of the rooms. The atmosphere ! cloth. What they most want is enough, 
is musty and the walls exhale that catarrhal , This is a type of the 

odor which Balzac speaks of in “Pere Goriot.” VISIT TO A boarding house. The tene- 
The wall paper is of a shiny, obsolete sort. TCMril/lirMT ment is not very different, 
with a dim green pattern on a buff ground, ; • I . choose one in 

and Time has left his finger marks upon it. I Dutchtown, and we find it a little difBcult to 
Or, maybe they are the marks of the board- ■ get into, for the good housewife suspects a 
ers’ fingers. The place is fairly clean and j scheme to inveigle her husband into some 
Is Quiet, save for occasional dull sounds that • new' insurance company. ‘*My husband, he 
emanate from the refinery at the foot of the i pdongs yet by two of dem insinsinatlons 
street or the passage of a horse and wagon i jjg gcn’t wa'nd some more insurance," 
over the bowlder pavement w’ith a disturb- gjjg declares; and it looks as if the poor man 


ance like a charge of artillery. Beside the ■ could hardly afford to carry any more, for 


faint noises from the refinery odors of its are five healthy appetites on exhibition 

bone dust come in at the windows, when the i kitchera table all belonging to his off- j 

breeze carries them. The outlooks from the i spring. These boys and girls, of apparently 
■windows include half a dozen houses of the | same age, are warmly though coarsely 
same kind, two or three small factories, a dressed, and are stowing out of sight bread, I 
lumber yard and a stable. By leaning well out omelette that the mother, j 


month for bis tenement of five rooms. He 
does not go to the theater, but he manages 
to get away once or twice in the summer to 
a picnic and has been to Coney Island several 
times. 

In nearly all of the tenements in this region 
the lower halls are as dark as night and the 
stairs are narrow and sometimes 'winding. 
They are q{ wood, and a fire in one of them 
is a serious matter. .\s one opens the door 
be is assailed by a fierce odor of fermented 
cabbage, pickled meat, onion soup, fish that 
died long, long ago, cheese that has been 
prowling about disi'eputable quarters of the 
city until it has lost all respect for law, and 
too often there is added to the nosegay a dis¬ 
tinct smell of sewage. By all the signs 
these should be unhealthy places for human 
occupation. What is the reason they are not? 

There is a lo-wer sort of tenement near the 


of the upper windows you can enlarge the i Pressed in faded black, with a shawl on her i refineries which is occupied less frequently 


prospect so as to take in a grocery and a 


•aioon. 

The bill of fare appears to content the 


head—■why do people in tenements have to 


wear shawls on their heads, especially in¬ 
doors?—is cooking in installments. The eggs 


patrons. There is a big bowl of*oatmeal wftjj' are a little tired, or it may be that somebody 



BOARDING HOUSES, FLATS AND SALOONS NEAR THE REFINERY. 


blue milk every morning, and fried steaks 
are served for breakfast, with alternations of 
liver and bacon. If the boarders have been 
very good they have eggs two or three times 
In summer. Few of the men return for lunch, 
so that the noon meal is light and consists 
principally of picked up stuff. The refinery 
men who take their dinners with them, in a 
pail, are supplied with cold meat, bread, 
cometimes a pint of soup, and often a bit 
of pie or a little jam on a slice of bread. For 
■upper there is a chunk of meat, corned beef 
or an undeslr.l corner of the sow most com¬ 
monly, with boiled potatoes, soup, rice pud¬ 
ding or baker's pie, sweetened so much that 
it makes your hearf burn to think of it, and 
tea and coffee boiled out of all recognition. 
The ministrations of Mrs. Borer and Mrs. 
Lemcke have never modified the asperities of 
the cuisine, and to tell the truth dainties 
would probably be wasted on the burly fellows 


in a neighboring flat has left a cover off 
and delicatessen is escaping—or gas. The 
kitchen is rather cheery, with its outlook on 
a block of yards, decorated with a wash in 
which flannel shirts and drawers are con¬ 
spicuous. The table is covered with oil 
cloth, the furniture and dishes are of the 
simplest, and a sewing machine stands in the 
corner. In the three little bed rooms be¬ 
tween the parlor and kitchen there is room 
for beds and no more, unless it be a chair 
or two. The only light they have is from 
small windows opening into the dim hall. 
The parlor, which will be the best bed room 
as soon as the family calls for expansion, is 
cheaply carpeted, has a table wtth a chenille 
cover, a china cat on the mantel with some 
other inexpensive decorations, durable chairs, 
a couple of religious books, a photograph of the 
head of the family, conscious ot his Sunday 
clothes and a trifle frightened at the camera, 
a colored certificate of membership in an asso¬ 
ciation and a glass cross on a little mat. This 


by Germans. The Poles are gathering there, 
although the largest Polish colony is in Green- 
point, a couple of miles from the largest re¬ 
finery. This wretched barrack stands in the 
yards of other tenements, and hence has 
neither air nor light enough, and each build¬ 
ing is a menace to the other, not only in caco 
of fire, but In the event of an epidemic. Rent 
is low. You can hire two rooms for $3.50 a 
month, but most people would prefer to 
sleep in the yard. There was plumbing, once, 
but some of it has been torn out, and water is 
obtainable only In the lower halls. The 
closets are In wooden sheds, in the yards be¬ 
tween the front and rear tenements. An 
abominable odor pervades the precincts, and 
as you climb the damp, dark, fouled stairs, 
festooned with drying clothes, you find that 
some of it is due to slops that have been set 
out in the halls until such time as the resi¬ 
dents feel ambitious enough to go down to 
the yard and empty them. Three room flats 
In the front houses rent for $3.50 to $8. The 
rooms are usually swept, and sometimes are 
really neat, but one who lives in such sur¬ 
roundings must perforce suffer from the un- 
cleanness of others. In all these poorer quar¬ 
ters the furnishings are of the simplest, and 
in the way of decoration there are chromos 
representing the Virgin and saints. 

When running on full time the Havemey- 
ers & Elder refinery employ 3,000 men, aside 
from teamsters and coopers. Some of these 
men have been with the company for thirty 
and a few for thirty-six years, and it is said 
that the average length of service is eight 
and one-half years for each employe. Ninety 
per cent, of the men speak German, even 
when they are Poles. The average wage is $13 
a week; the lowest, earned by boys and girls 
in the packing departments, $6 a week. Labor 
in the departments calling for no special 
knowledge or skill receives an average of 
$10.60 weekly. Over 1,100 men make over $10 
a week and stokers receive $1.35 for niue 
hours’ work, and there are 254 mechanics— 
carpenters, machinists and engineers—whose 
earnings range from $2.50 to $3.50 a day. In 
the country these wages would insure a good 
living. In the city the cost of meat, milk, 
groceries and rent does not leave a large mar¬ 
gin for Wall street operations. 

At the leading savings ’ 
bank of this district ' 

SAVINGS SMALL“ '^at the- 

sugar men seldom have 4 
large accounts. One of the officers believes 
that twenty years ago the habit of saving 
among them was more general than it is to- - 
day, though it may be that they put their i 
money into other things: assessment insur-1 


SUGAR MEN’S 


ance and sick benefit societies, or into church 
savings institutions, for exa-mple. He says 


Who gather in theiv shirt sleeves about the i man makes $y a week, and toe pays $8 a chat he has found the Irish improvident as'nj 




























































































THE SUGAR TRUST AXD ITS EMPLOYES. 


51 


class, but the Germans more thrifty. “The 
Italians are the boys!” he adds. "It is seldom 
that one of them brings less than a hundred 
dollars at a time. They save their wages and 
go back to Italy.” 

In spite of the heat in which the men work 
for nine, ten and twelve hours a day, the 
general health appears to be good, and this 
despite the recklessness of the men , in the 
hottest room. The men In the moulding 
rooms, for instance, will expose themselves 
at open windows in the dead of winter, half 


commonly for drunkenness, are fewer than 
among the men in the foundries, factories 
and shops of the neighborhood. Indeed, there 
has been an average, in late years, of hardly 
more than two arrests a year, directly from 
the sugar houses. Drunkenness is not tol¬ 
erated, and if two men are found engaged in 
a fight the case is not Investigated; both men 
are discharged on the instant. 

There are provisions enough for drink, for 
the seedy, melancholy, depressing neighbor¬ 
hood is supplied with saloons, not a few of 



AMONG THE TENEMENTS. 


rude and glistening with sweat, and they 
will go across the street for beer in the 
thinnest of dress, but they generally go back 
into the heat before they are chilled. Be¬ 
fore the ventilating apparatus was put in heat 
prostrations were common, especially among 
new men. A physician who lives in the 
neighborhood says he was often called upon 
in summer to treat as many as twenty-five 
cases in a day, and the whole room would be 
converted Into a temporary hospital. The 
treatment was generally prompt, ice being 
applied to the head, and death or permanent 
injury seldom ensued. 

There is a hospital a little way from the 
largest refinery, and in case of accident the 
men can be removed with little trouble or 
delay. When the employe is an old and trusted 
workman the cost of his stay in the hospital 
is not heavy. The number of cases sent to 
this institution does not amount to one-tenth 
as many as befoVe the improvements were 
made in apparatus and ventilation. The 
heat prostrations now do not average two a 
year. -4nd as the improved machinery obvi¬ 
ates the need of much handling of the sugar 
there are fewer cases also of “grocers’ itch.” 
Sugar is bad stuff to work in. It is apt to 
cause an eczematous condition of the skin. 
It is also liable to make trouble through In¬ 
testinal fermentation if it is eaten freely, 
but the men do not care much for it after they 
have been in the refineries for a time. At 
first they nibble at it, and if seen they are 
seldom checked by the foreman. There is. 
however, an objection if a Polack absented- 
mindedly fills his dinner pail with it and 
takes it home to his family, as he has on sev¬ 
eral occasions tried to do. 

.\s to their conduct, the men give little 
cause for complaint. They are usually steady 
men of family, and the arrests, which are 


them in charge of men who can hardly speak 
English. They advertise beer that w’as not 
made in Milwaukee or St. Louis, and it is 
served in “baths” that would cause a Coney 
Island bartender to gasp. The free lunch is 
composed of pilot bread of uncertain age. 


evening they are popular. A good deal of 
their business is the “growler” trade and 
sugar-makers are steady patrons. Beer is the 
staple, but not always lager. As one pro¬ 
prietor explained, “Thim Poles is mixed ale 
min, same’s the Irish. It’s the Dutch dhrinks 
lager.” 

Now, the only rea- 

REFINERIESSELL son why these sa- 
RPPR AT rriQT 

DCI^nHI t/UOI. tije patronage of 
the sugar makers is that they want a change 
in their beer once in a while, for there is a 
bar in every refinery, and the beer is sup¬ 
plied at cost price. To do this the company 
must take out a license like any other land¬ 
lord, and its bar is In a cellar. It Is the 
quietest bar in Brooklyn, for loafing is not 
allowed there, and the tapster’s occupa¬ 
tion is chiefly that of filling the pails that 
are brought down from the hot rooms over¬ 
head by messengers. Every man has his 
own can. This beer varies slightly In price, 
according to season, brew and quality, but 
a dollar will buy about thirty tickets, and 
each ticket is good for a pound of beer. A 
pound? Yes, that is the way it is sold, and, 
considering the ability of some bar men to 
convert it into suds, it is the only honest 
way. The consumption Is Immense, for the 
heat generates a thirst that is even w'llling 
to assuage itself w'ith water, if worst comes 
to worst, and water is supplied also; but un¬ 
restrained drinking is not allowed, and the 
worker himself soon learns to know his limit. 
Cases have been reported of men who have 
earned $35 a month drawing $16, the rest 
having been held out for their beer, but mod¬ 
eration is really necessary, in water as in 
beer, for heat stroke and illness are liable 
to ensue after an excess in either. 

The men usually take their dinners to tho 
refineries with them, although for such as 
wish there are boarding houses and alleged 
restaurants within easy reach. In the res¬ 
taurants one dines at a long table in a 
gloomy ground floor room or basement with 
no carpet on the floor and with oil cloth for 



SUGAR MAKERS, 


chemical cheese and fearsome things from the 
delicatessen shops, made of old liver and oily 
fish. Kitchen chairs and stained tables are 
the furniture, and there are bills on the walls 
announcing balls and receptions, and chromos 
advertising brands of whisky and brews of 
beer. Little gatherings of three to a dozen 
frowsy, drowsy residents are to be found in 
these saloons at almost any hour, and in the 


a table cover. Fifteen cents is the cost of a 
meal in some of these places, and that pro¬ 
vides one with meat, bread, potatoes, pie 
and coffee. For 5 cents one may have rolls 
and coffee in the morning, and for from $4 
to $6 a W'eek one may not only board, but 
have a room. 

There are lockers in the basements of the 
refineries for the employes, and there art 
























































































































































THE SUGAR, TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 



Iron tanks ten ■ feet long, four wide and j 
foui’_decp in wlilch they can bathe daily, j 
Many or them enjoy their dips, and there 
is a good dea: oi spattering end ducking and 
skylarking after hours. It does not appear 
that they use these, tubs so much for clean¬ 
liness as for coolness, and hundreds do not 
use them at all. ' Oddly, It Is the men In 
the hottest rooms who use them least. 
Oddly, too, it is those men who are, at.least 
in appearance, the sturdiest of the company. 
One who has been long associated with them 
says that he believes that the closeness, 
heat and the much drinking w'eaken them in 
time, and that when they are attacked by 
disease they are found to have weak hearts 
and succumb early, but it does not appear 
that the work itself Induces disease of any 
sort, now that machinery has so replaced 
hand labor as to obviate the necessity of 
contact with the sugar. 

There are no labor unions among the men, 
at least as sugar workers. Four years ago ' 


1 there was a strike for higher wages. It 
did not succeed. The men who went out 
were replaced by Poles. Poles do not organ¬ 
ize unions because there are dues and assess¬ 
ments. Hence there are no unions. The 
drivers had a society until last summer that 
was organized partly, it is said, for the cre¬ 
ation of a sick benefit fund, but they became 
unruly and refused to clean their wagons, 
for which offense their society was disrupted 
by the truck superintendent, so they say. 
Many of the men are members of the For¬ 
esters and other assessment societies. 

Almost invariably the children of these 
men are pupils of our public schools or of the 
large parochial schools of “Dutchtown.” One 
of the teachers says: “When they are bright 
they are as bright as anybody, but when they 
are dull they are duller than anybody else 
They are good children in the main, but 
they might bathe a little oftener.” Recent¬ 
ly Greeks have appeared in the sugar dis- 
' trict. They are florists or else candy 


makers. Their children are the brightest 
of the lot, and will skip two classes some¬ 
times, but they want to leave as soon as they 
have learned to count American money, so 
that they can go out and make it. 

Last year the American people ate 2,000,- 
000 tons of sugar. Of this the American 
Sugar Refining Company, otherwise known as 
the trust, made 1,385,000 tons, and when to 
this output is added that of the other Brook¬ 
lyn refiners, it is seen that the nation has 
to depend on Brooklyn for more than relig¬ 
ion and Institutes and bicycle paths. The 
Havemeyers & Elder refineries putout6,000,- 
000 pounds of sugar every day except Sun¬ 
day. When to the Brooklyn output we add 
that of Boston, Jersey City, Philadelphia, 
New Orleans and San Francisco we may be¬ 
lieve that 10,000 people owe their living to 
it, and considering the quality of the work, 
these people are fairly paid and are not dis¬ 
contented. . , . 




MODERN ALTRUISTIC INDUSTRIAL EXPERIMENTS. 


We of this generation may not live to see 
an industrial millennium, but it is on the way. 
A surprising number of reforms, concessions 
and exhibitions; of interest in the. employe 
by the employer have been made in this 
country within the past dozen of years. Here 
Is the Pennsylvania Railroad Company sup¬ 
porting hospitals for its men and retiring old 
conductors and brakemen on pensions. Here 
Is the ostensibly heartless rolling mill in 
South Chicago carrying on a model hospital 
and medical service on its own grounds. Here 
are factories and foundries and mills and 
works of all sorts in which are reading rooms 
and restaurants and relief societies and 


been In practice since 1886. A man may take 
his dividend In stock, if he would rather, and 
if he leaves the employ of the company his 
stock will be bought back from him. In two 
or three bad years there were no dividends, 
but in the average the employe receives a 
bonus on sharing day of 6 per cent, on his 
wage. Out of the capital reserve the com¬ 
pany pays physicians who attend to cases of 
Illness among its men, and a $40 allowance 
for funeral expenses is made to his family 
when a man dies. The family also receives 
a stipend of two-thirds of the wages earned 
by the deceased, iintil it can support itself. 
Though the company does not want to be a 


telllgent, moral. Industrious people they are 
not needed. 

The workings of a sharing system are ex¬ 
cellently illustrated in the big shops of Proc¬ 
tor & Gamble, at Ivory^ale, ten miles from 
Cincinnati. Soap is made in these works, and 
this is an Industry that requires no great 
amount of skill on the part of a majority 
of the employes, but by stimulation of their 
interest in the work the company has se¬ 
cured excellent results and has raised the 
amount and the quality of labor. Dividend 
day is an occasion in Ivorydale. They have 
speeches and music and flags and a great 
hooray, and what is more substantial there 



tliSirii 







rm 


THE PROCTOR & GAMBLE WORKS AT IVORYDALE, 0. 


clubs, and the more of such things there are 
the fewer the complaints and less frequent 
the strikes. 

^ Among the most interesting of these ex¬ 
periments is that of profit sharing, which is 
now in operatlcu in a number of shops and 
factories. The Nelson Manufacturing Com¬ 
pany of St. Louis, which makes sanitary en¬ 
gineering supplies, has feund It profitable and 
Is earning so much money. In spite of its di¬ 
visions, that it Is creating a new industrial 
town in Edwardsville. There are 400 people 
in the works, and they are of the best sort, 
bright, busy, conscientious, economical. Most 
of them have become stockholders, so that 
they realize doubly on their earnings, and 
this is no experiment, for profit sharing has 


landlord, it will erect a house for any one of 
its men and sell it to him on easy terms, pro¬ 
viding it also with water and light, paving 
the street and setting out trees before it. In 
no single case .has a workman failed to pay 
his installments. There is a communal gar¬ 
dener and hothouse, and every place Is pro¬ 
vided with flowers and plants in summer. An 
excellent school has been built, and there aie 
opportunities for the youngster to learn a 
trade easily, yet thoroughly. A free library, 
free concerts, by a band of thirty pieces, all 
workmen, a co-operative store, and a public 
coal supply which gives soft coal to the oper- 
atlv»:s at $1.25 a ton, are among the other 
benefits of the place. Though it Is large and 
growing it has no police, because among in¬ 


is a distribution of checks. The dividends 
paid to the working people are the same as 
those paid to stockholders, and it is, nat¬ 
urally. to every man’s interest to make the 
factory earn as much as possible, since he 
is to share In its prosperity. In 1886 the 
company instituted a Saturday half holiday, 
with no reduction of pay from the sixty 
hour standard, and it was found, to the sur¬ 
prise of many, that exactly as much work 
was done in fifty-five hours as had before 
been accomplished in sixty. In the next year 
profit sharing went into effect, and while 
the amounts have varied according to earn¬ 
ings the additions received by the people 
have been substantial, since the company's 
dividends have ranged from 12 to 20 per cent. 

































MODERN ALTRT'ISTIC INDTSTRIAT. 


53 


EXrriNMEXT!^; 


An employe, for example, who earns $ 1,000 
a year, receives a gratuity, If you call It that, 
of $ 206 , In a 20 per cent. year. And the 
company has encouraged Its people to buy Its 
stock, advancing money for that purpose, as 
It has to be bought In the market, and giving 
two years In "which to pay the loan. Four 
per cent, is charged for the use of the money, 
but, as the stock Is earning five times that 
the buyer is not severely pressed, it his 
block of stock Is a small one. Among the 
factory hands there are over a hundred own¬ 
ers of the common stock—practically every 
head of a family—and they own, on an aver¬ 
age, ten shares apiece. 

Another feature 
of the Proctor & 

FOR SOAP MAKERS Gamble establish¬ 
ment Is a pension 
fund, administered both by the company 
and th aen. The pensions are to benefit 
not merily aged employes, but those who are 
ccmpelled by disease or accident to stop work. 
The company pays hall of the pension and 
the men raise the other halt by assessments. 
One small source of Income to the pension 
fund is the dividend which Is withheld from 


PENSION 


general than it was a tew years ago, and tho 
people dress better. At the first dividend 
meeting the hands attended just as they were 
dressed tor work, in jumpers and overalls, 
and with grimy bodies and unblacked shoes. 
Now they are a well dressed and respectable 
looking company when they assemble to re¬ 
ceive their checks, and the affair winds up 
with a dapce and jolllflcatlon Into which all 
of them enter with great heart. More and 
more the employes are putting forth efforts 
to acquire their homes and in this they are 
encouraged by the company. Not long ago 
the company was troubled by the unsteadi¬ 
ness of Its people, by their lack of energy and 
Interest, by their brief service, a man working 
for a day, a month, or a year, as the whim 
tO’Ok him. Now the men come to stay. They 
apply themselves steadily and faithfully to 
business, they hope to learn In order that they 
may be advanced, for all the higher places are 
filled by promotion, and a great deal of bother 
and expense is saved by not having to break 
in new hands every week or so. 

Similar undertakings, either In the way of 
profit sharing or of provisions for the safety, 
health, comfort or profit of the people, are re- 


that the windows were kept clean and the 
sunlight could come through. He went home, 
took off half an inch of Chicago soot from his 
own factory windows and jubilantly an¬ 
nounced that he had made a big saving in 
his gas bills in consequence. 


A BROOKLYN 
EXPERIMENT. 


J. H. Williams & 
Co., makers o f 
drop forgings la 
Brooklyn, have 
done what every factory owner should 
do; they have protected . their men 
from accident by constructing shields 
and wire nets about their belts, gears 
and wheels; they have bell signals and mech¬ 
anisms by which the belt may be Instantly 
thrown off, in case of a break or accident, 
without notifying the engineer; and they 
have cold air blown into the forge shop in 
summer, every worker at a forge standing 
under a separate tube. Formerly the men 
had to leave their work every now and then, 
to cool off. Now they are nearly as com¬ 
fortable as the machinists. A number of 
shower baths add to the possibilities of com¬ 
fort and cleanliness, and there is a unique 
addition in the form of a tank with a wrjnger 



4 ^ 

REGISTER COMPANY, DAYTON, O. 


FACTORY OF THE NATIONAL CASH 


a few employes—very few, and shortly des¬ 
tined to be done—who, because of drunken¬ 
ness or faithlessness or Idleness or dishonesty, 
have been declared unworthy to share in 
the profits of the firm. There are at present 
but one or two pensioners, as the fund has 
Just been established, and the first man to 
receive help is still in the company’s employ, 
but as he suffers from a physical disability 
he cannot do the work he did a few, years 
ago. The pension, added to his present earn¬ 
ings, enables him to make just aa much in 
a week as he did when his health was sound, 
and those dependent on him, therefore, do 
not suffer. , , • ' 

The attitude of the company Is that labor 
is a species of capital and that the best way 
to make a man sober and industrious and re¬ 
spectful of property rights is to make a 
capitalist out of him. There is no charity in 
this arrangement— no pretense of philan¬ 
thropy; it is just plain business. Yet the 
company does take an almost paternal Inter¬ 
est in its 800 hands, and a little while ago it 
sent half a dozen hard cases to take a rum 
cure at an institute for inebriates. The ef¬ 
fect of profit sharing has been to make the 
men more cleanly and apparently self-respect¬ 
ing, even If it has not affected their lives and 
ways of thought more deeply. Thrift is more 


ported now in a hundred towns and cities of 
the United States. Among those who have 
made radical departures from the old, indif¬ 
ferent way of dealing with employes is the 
Cleveland Hardware Company, which has 
cleaned up its rolling mills, reduced its day’s 
work to eight hours, put in a cool air blast 
to lower the heat of its rooms, provided a 
lunch at cost for its men, and, in short, intro¬ 
duced so many reforms that the Chamber of 
Commerce in that city has appointed-a com¬ 
mittee to follow and study its workings; the 
Chandler & Taylor Company of Indianapolis; 
the Heinz pickle works in Pittsburg; Warner 
Bros., corset makers of Bridgeport, Conn., 
who have spent $75,000 in gymnasia and 
club rooms for their people; the Acme White 
Lead Company of Detroit; the Eastman Ko¬ 
dak Company of Rochester, N. Y.; the Walker 
& Pratt Iron Works of Watertown, Mass., 
which have been provided lately with big 
baths for the men; the Sherwin & Williams 
Paint Company of Cleveland; Fels & Co., 
soap makers of Philadelphia, and the Purina 
Flour Mills of St. Louis. In many other 
places the reforms have not been Introduced 
because they are not known. A Chicago man, 
going through a well managed factory a tew 
weeks ago, observed the ease with which the 
men did certain work, tor the simple reason 


in which the men may wash the light shlrti 
they wear at the forges, and a drying room, 
where they will find them ready to put on la 
the morning. Hoods have been constructed 
in the grinding department so that the dust 
of emery, which was formerly thick and irri¬ 
tating, has entirely disappeared. It is said 
that the men missed it, at first, and believed 
that they could not work as well as in places 
where the wheels were wholly exposed, but 
there would be a commotion if the old system 
was restored. The pickle room, likewise, in 
which the forgings are soaked in hot acid, to 
remove the scale, is commonly a most disa¬ 
greeable and unhealthy place, but in this 
factory the biting fumes are pumped into 
the upper air through hoods above the vats. 
There is in this factory a mutual aid society, 
with two hundred members and nearly a thou¬ 
sand dollars on hand. A few cents are ab¬ 
stracted from the weekly wage of each, the 
amount varying according to his class, and he 
receives free medical attendance, free medi¬ 
cine and a cash allowance in case of illness 
or accident; or, if the illness results in death, 
his family receives $100. While there is an 
excellent fire brigade, and the men are 
drilled every few months in handling the hose 
and sprinklers and pumps, and while wells 
have been sunk on- the premises to secure • 





























64 


MODERN ALTRUISTIC INDUSTRIAL EXPERIMENI’S. 


water supply, the company insures the tools 
of all Its men without expense to them. A 
yearly subscription is taken up for the local 
hospitals—the only soliciting for money that 
is permitted in the place—and it one of them 
is sent to any hospital in the city he receives 
special attention. On the two days of the 
Dewey parade in New York the entire body 
of men in these works saw the display from 
a stand that their employers had erected for 
them at a cost of $800, and lunch was pro¬ 
vided for them, free of cost. A boy who lost 
an arm in this place has been adopted by the 
company, educated at Its expense, and has a 
guarantee of a place in its clerical force for 
life. 


By all odds the most 

AN INDUSTRIAL significant and inter- 

cvianunaiv esting industrial ex- 

SYMPHONY. p„iment of the coun¬ 
try at this time is in operation at the works 
of the National Cash Register, In Dayton, O. 
Id most factories there are signs inviting 
the visitor to stay out. Here there are invita¬ 
tions for him to go in, and not only that, but 
regular guides are employed to show him 
about the place and explain its workings. In 
comparison with the thousand and one mills 
and shops and factories in which joyless peo¬ 
ple work at joyless tasks for a living wage, 
year after year, without hope, without the 
pleasures that are everybody’s right, this 
place Is an industrial paradise, and you see 
bright and happy faces in it; you hear cheer¬ 
ful voices and the sun seems to shine there 
more brightly than it does in town. 


Here, again, there is no pretense of charity. 
The money spent in schools, lectures, deco¬ 
rations, baths, bcis, restaurants, kitchens, 
flowers, and other unexpected things, is money 
Invested in the same way and for the same 
purpose as money spent for iron, coal, enamel, 
paper and what not, and it produces just as 
definite a return. Of course the heads of the 
company are humane and kindly people, or it 
would not have occurred to them to make this 
sort of an Investment, but their own decla¬ 
ration is—and you see it .on boards and ban¬ 
ners all over their shops—"It pays.” John 
H. Patterson, the president of the company, 
was once told by his employer, when he was 
a boy and was working for a curmudgeon, to 
mind his own business. The occasion of this 
rebuke was the offer of a suggestion for im¬ 
proving the work in his master’s shop and 
saving money. He resolved then, that if ever 
he became an employer himself, he would 
not treat any of his people in such a fashion, 
but would encourage them to make such sug¬ 
gestions as they could for the bettering of 
the work. 

And that is one of the features of his sys¬ 
tem now. In each room you see a "sugges¬ 
tion and complaint book,” in which every em¬ 
ployee is invited to put down anything and 
everything the he believes will lighten or 
strengthen or cheapen or in any way im¬ 
prove the cash register, which is the only 
article of merchandise made here, or simplify 
or better the way of making it. Every really 
practical suggestion is put to a trial in the 
machine shops and testing room, and if it is 
good the man or woman who has suggested it 
receives a prize varying in accordance with 
Its importance, from $5 to $50, the prizes 
being awarded at a midsummer picnic, when 
there is music, dancing, kite flying, fireworks, 
a dinner and a general good time. The value 
of the prizes is $1,230 a year and to this must 
be added several hundred dollars for the en¬ 
couragement of home and ground improve¬ 
ment in the neighborhood. 

On entering the works ono is immediately 
iffljiressed by the light, the airiness, the clean¬ 


liness. The shops are practically of Iron and 
glass, so great is the window space. In the 
machinery department the window’s reach 
from floor to ceiling, so that every part of 
every floor is abundantly lighted. 


In order to keep the 
shops clean a corps 
of "white wings” has 
been secured, and 
men wash and scrape and sweep and gather 
all day long. Consequently, there is none of 


PERFECTION 
IN CLEANLINESS 



The House of Usefulness. 


the litter usually to be found in a factory, lit¬ 
tle of the smell of oil and waste, none of the 
dust and none of the danger from fire that 
arises in other places from heaps of papers 
and oil soaked rags and rubbish. The floor of 
the machine shops are as clean as floors in an 
average dry goods shop, and as to the other 


shop that employs 2,100 people, contains 
sixty-five departments and represents a capi¬ 
tal of $5,000,000. As to the people, they are 
nearly all Americans, nearly all of more than 
grammar school education, all of good char¬ 
acter, and all desirable. When a place in such 
a factory is regarded as a prize, the company 
has its pick of help. Indeed, there are no 
haphazard admissions. Every candidate for 
work in the principal departments must have 
health, a good record and must either have 
received a high school education or its equiv¬ 
alent. The young fellows who begin work 
there as messengers are neatly uniformed 
and personal cleanliness is one of the requis¬ 
ites. Indeed, it would be inexcusable were 
dirty faces to be found In a place that provides 
not merely wash rooms and hot and cold wa- 
Aer on every floor, but bath rooms, and more¬ 
over, allows every one to bathe once a week 
and every foundryman to bathe twice a week 
on the company’s time, and as often as he 
pleases on his own time. It is understood 
that the people shall arrive and depart in 
street dress and with "company” hands and 
faces, and so far as appearance goes the exit 
of employes at noon might indicate the let¬ 
ting out of church, or the recess in a young 
ladies’ seminary. 

One of the signs that a visitor reads on en¬ 
tering the administration building contains 
the statement that "by the year 1915 no appli¬ 
cant for a position in the factory will be con¬ 
sidered unless the applicant, when a child, 
attended a kindergarten.” And the chief of 
police in Dayton makes the surprising state¬ 
ment that he has never arrested a kindergar¬ 
ten graduate. Although the company does 
not assume to control its employes outside of 
the shops, it nevertheless advises and warns 
those infrequent persons who are leading an 
irregular life, to reform. A little while ago 
dozens of the men would go out at noon and 
buy a glass or two of beer or liquor, for the 
sake of the free lunch they could eat with 
it. There is so little of that sort of thing 
now that all the saloon keepers have moved 
away from the neighborhood, one of the 
liquor dealers saying; “The nearer you get to 



THE KINDERGARTEN ON THE LAWN. 


rooms—why, no private houses are kept more 
clean and neat. The effect of this cleanliness 
alone on the health and spirits of the em¬ 
ployes is considerable, but it Is heightened by 
the flowers and plants and vines that have 
been introduced in every department, and by 
the cheery decorations of flags, festoons of 
bunting, pesters and other ornaments. 

Of course, ihere is perfect organization, or 
there could be no such perfect results in a ' 


that place (the cash register works), "the worse 
business you do.” 


PRETTY NEAR , temptaU^n to^^fr. 
THE MILLENNIUM <l«ent the saloons 

at noon may be re¬ 
moved, the company is about to erect a din¬ 
ing room for the men, similar to that which 
it has already given to the women. And this 
latter is unique. Imagine a big, hrigbtl/. 

































modern altruistic industrial experiments. 


_ lighted, well warmed and ventilated room on 
• the top floor, reached by elevators, gay with 
J flags and streamers, with vines climbing up 
f the posts and walls, and with dozens of ta- 
, hies, each covered by a snowy cloth, each 
with a pot of ferns or palms In the center, 
each served by white aproned waiters. Who 
are the girls taking their turns at this ser¬ 
vice? Imagine cozy corners with ample cush¬ 
ions and pillows at the windows, and iu one 
corner, imagine a "rest room” with several 
beds curtained off from the rest of the hall! 
If a girl has a headache and does not care to 
remain at the table during the noon hour, she 
can lie down here or lounge In an easy chair 
and take a nap. If during the day she is 
taken ill she can go up to the rest room and 
remain there as long as she pleases. Isn’t 
that like the millennium? 

Although each girl brings a light lunch, 
usually, food is served free to her In this 
restaurant. She has, for instance, roast beef 
and potatoes on Monday, soup and pudding on 
Tuesday, stew and dressing on Wednesday, 
baked beans and salad on Thursday, salad 
and gingerbread on Friday and on Saturday 
dried beef and corn. Tea, coffee and milk are 
served free with every meal. The kitchen 
Is on the same floor. There are In the same 
room a reading table, a case of books, and a 
piano, and they who want to play or sing or 
dance after the lunch can do so. Moreover, 
the health and comfort of the girls are looked 
after in other ways. Those who attend ma¬ 
chines, for example, have chairs with high 
backs, iron foot rests and foot stools. They 
have a ten minute recess In the morning 
and another of the same length In the after¬ 
noon. The company provides each with an 
apron and oversleeves, which are laundered 
without charge to the wearers. The limita¬ 
tions of sex are likewise considered, and they 
do not arrive at the shops until an hour after 
the men. In order to prevent crowding at 
the doors and difficulty in obtaining seats in 
the street cars, they are also dismissed ten 
minutes earlier in the afternoon. All hands 
have a Saturday half holiday, and all are 
paid at a ten hour rate, though the girls 
work but eight hours, and the men nine and 
one-half. 


In order to minimize the danger from Are 
and panic the employes in every department 
are put through occasional Are drills, and 
the men have certain posts in case of an 
alarm, though the hose, the hand grenades, 
the automatic sprinklers and other saving 
devices, as well as the stout construction of 
the buildings, make the possibility of fire re¬ 
mote. What is more unusual and interest¬ 
ing is the hall or theater where the drum¬ 
mers take their lessons. The stage is fitted 
up like a shop, and the drummer, in the pres¬ 
ence of a congregation of his kind, must go 
upon the stage and try to sell a cash register 
to an officer of the company who does not 
want one. The officer will use every avail¬ 
able argument against it, and the drummer 
must meet and refute the argument. 

INSTRUCTION LT ZTror \ZTs 

societies connected with 
the works, and for Jolli¬ 
fications and prize distributions in win¬ 
ter. The company has 9,000 colored, lantern 
slides, and these are used in imparting in¬ 
struction to the people—sometimes technical 
instruction, relative to their work, sometimes 
moral instruction, as in the Sunday school 
class that assembles here, and sometimes 
general instruction as to foreign countries 
and so on, that will add to the sum of infor¬ 
mation and intelligence. A picture showing 
a man wasting a quantity of benzine by al¬ 
lowing it to run from a tank on his hands 


IN ECONOMY. 


when he washes up in the evening, enforces 
on the spectators a lesson in economy, and 
the men thereafter draw only as much ben¬ 
zine as they need to remove ink or other 
stains. Here, too, mechanics are instructed 



A Window Box on Brown Street. 


in the complete working of machinery of 
which they in their work are required to 
know but a part. A man, for instance, whoso 
daily job it is to make simply a pawl or a 
gear, learns what part, in the economy of 
the cash register, that bit of metal plays. 
This offsets in a measure the increasing ten¬ 
dency to specialization which, in many fac- | 
tories, is carried so far that the man who 


is kept secret from the employes. On the 
contrary, every detail of the business, in¬ 
cluding the day’s output of registers—usually 
130 a day, and about 200,000 up to this time 
—is posted on bulletins and monitor boards. 
Equally unusual are the suggestive mottoes 
posted on the walls of the shops, such as, 
“Knowdedge comes from observation; skill 
from practice.—Froebel.” “The beautiful Is 
as useful as the useful.—Victor Hugo.” 

There is a purpose in the display of post¬ 
ers that are to be seen everywhere and that 
in one building constitute almost an art gal¬ 
lery. They are part of a scheme to interest 
the employes in the work. These posters 
advertise every sort of thing that men make 
to sell, from coeoa to steam engines, but 
they are exhibited in order to secure adapta¬ 
tions, and whenever an employe finds a way 
to utilize the subject of a poster for the bene¬ 
fit of his company he receives his prize. 
For instance, here is a picture of a scorcher 
running away from other riders on his bi¬ 
cycle. The man to whom it occurs that such 
a picture could advertise the register by put¬ 
ting below it such a legend as “The Na¬ 
tional Cash Register Distances All Others,” 
submits the proposition, and if it is accepted 
he receives an award. There w'ere in 1897 
four thousand suggestions for improvements 
in one way and another, and the next year 
the machine and its methods had been so 
improved that the suggestions fell off to 2,300. 
It should be mentioned that the cash prizes . 
include $100 a month in gold to the two sales¬ 
men who show the best record for sales dur¬ 
ing the preceding three months. 

Five papers are published by the company 
for circulation, among its people, the N. C. 
R., which is intended for circulation espe¬ 
cially among its agents; the Advance Club 
Record, the Hustler, the South Park News, 



THE DINING ROOM. 


makes one part, say, of a shoe, knows noth¬ 
ing of the rest of it. In this hall, likewise, 
are held the annual conventions of officers, 
agents from out of town, to the number of 
375 or so, and the 2,100 operatives. The 
business of the company is freely discussed 
at these big meetings. Another phase of this 
representative government is exhibited in the 
substitution for bosses and superintendents of 
a factory committee chosen In part from 
among the operatives themselves. Nothing 


and Pleasant Sunday Afternoons, the latter 
a paper for the little folks. There is a fre¬ 
quent issue also of descriptive pamphlets 
and programmes. 

QnriPTICQ ARC sre among the 

otH/ICI iCo Ant employes of the works 

more than thirty so¬ 
cieties, devoted, some 
some to to study, some to athletics, some to 
gardening, some to politics; some are relig- 
* ious and three are musical. The membership 


NUMEROUS. 

































































5a 


MODEHN’ AT.TUT’IS'riC IXEl'fiTRIAL EXPERIMENTS. 


varies from fourteen in the Autoharp Club, 
to nearly a thousand in the relief association, 
which guarantees certain payments in case 
of accident or Illness. The president himself 
is a member of this latter club, and when he 
was compelled, on a recent visit to New York 
to go to the hospital, he received his check 
for the time he was off duty, exactly as if he 
had been a planer or a typewriter. The Ad¬ 
vance Club studies and debates on matters 
concerning trades and industries and national 
politics as they effect or are affected by in¬ 
dustries. The domestic economy class, in 
charge of Mrs. L. D. Emerson, late of Pratt 
Institute, Brooklyn, learns how to sweep, to 
make beds, to cook, to do the marketing for a 
family, and so on. Other clubs study or dis¬ 
cuss or practice sewing, teaching, millinery. 


got their money. This is a customary atti¬ 
tude for complaining labor to assume, as 
everybody knows who has employed It. But 
an equal negligence and indifference of em¬ 
ployers toward their people is likewise a cus¬ 
tomary attitude. Dayton shows how both are 
benefited by reforms that, in proportion to 
the benefits they work are as cheap as they 
are feasible. The people try to do their best 
because there is every stimulus to do so, and 
they avoid doing their worst, if for no other 
reason, because there has been created in 
them an esprit de corps, a pride of place and 
a heightened self respect. 

Quite as remarkable as the work which is 
done for the employed is that of the House 
of Usefulness for their children. It is a so¬ 
cial settlement house without slums to draw 



THE CONVERSION OF SLIDERTOWN. 


farming, gardening, dancing, singing, gym¬ 
nastics, military drill and bicycle riding. 

The company has a library of its own and 
all employes have free access to its books. It 
has also a branch of the Dayton Public Li¬ 
brary in a building opposite the office, and in 
order to encourage reading and to give the 
easiest of access to the books, the volumes 
are placed in cases on wheels and are 
trundled through the shops. Each may 
therefore make his selections with as little 
delay and inconvenience as possible. Serious 
study is not merely encouraged, but in some 
departments it is exacted. In the tool room, 
for Instance, no apprentice is regarded as a 
fully qualified workman until he has taken a 
course in mechanical drawing. As many as 
800 men at a time are often studying in the 
night classes. Beside this are papers and 
magazines to which the people have access, 
as in the rest room for the girls. 

It is by such means as this that the com¬ 
pany endeavors, and successfully, to interest 
its employes in their work. It is not enough 
to make them comfortable and thankful; they 
must be roused to some concern for the labor 
they have in hand. And the more skill and in¬ 
telligence they bring to their task the better 
the results. When the first cash registers 
were sent abroad every one of them was re¬ 
turned as defective. This made the manu¬ 
facturers think. They saw that the machines 
were defective because the workmanship was 
careless and unsound, and it was unsound be¬ 
cause the mechanics did not care a rap 
whether it was good or bad, so long as they 


upon, for the slums vanished with the in¬ 
coming of the new order. Five or six years 
ago the neighborhood of the cash register 
^orks was the worst in Dayton. It was 
known as Slldertown, and it had an evil re¬ 
pute throughout the town and county. Loaf¬ 
ers were numerous, hoodlums broke windows', 
petty thieveries occurred, there was much 
drinking and disorder in the saloons, the 
houses were dull, out of repair, the streets 
were dirty and vacant lots were dumping 
places for the refuse not only of the houses 
but of the factory. The change to the most 
attractive part of the city was not made 
in a day, but it was made with surprising 
suddenness. The president once asked a me¬ 
chanic in his employ why he went several 
miles to and from his work, and he replied 
that he did so in order to secure a home in 
a good neighborhood. It was thereupon re¬ 
solved to make the factory district a gooo 
neighborhood. All the rubbish was taken ou« 
of the lots, and they were converted into 
lawns and gardens. The buildings were 
painted Inside and out in a warm, neutral 
tint; vines were planted so that they would 
run over walls and fences; the residents of 
the district were encouraged by prizes to 
improve their homes, and especially to plant 
flowers and vines and trees. The result was 
surprising. The factory instead of dissemin¬ 
ating dirt and disorder and ugliness, as most 
artistic influence and the people all around 
factories do. is the center of a refining and 
that part of Dayton are affected by the im¬ 


provements and are applying them to their 
own homes. 


THE HOUSE 


The House of Use¬ 
fulness is, in part, 

OF USEFULNESS. an example of what 

may be done with a little. The three 
rooms occupied by the deaconess — a bright 
minded and pleasant faced woman who 
inspires respect- and affection in her young 
charges — were furnished for J75. These three 
rooms, a bed room, sitting room and kitchen, 
are open for anybody’s inspection, and they 
are good enough and attractive enough for 
anyone to live in. In the larger rooms of the 
house one may see the busy, babbling throngs 
of children who are going through their exer¬ 
cises or are learning how to sew. They begin 
early to learn things that are going to be of 
use to them when they are older. 'They have, 
tor instance, a penny bank, and every child 
is encouraged to save, if only to have a little 
money on hand for Fourth of July and 
Christmas. Naturally, the children of . labor¬ 
ing people, especially persons of 8 or 10 years, 
do not save much, because they do not have 
much; but there is an average of 17 cents a 
head to their credit, and the sums range from 
a penny to $2. The amount now in the bank 
Is about $135, but as the holidays are over 
that figure will be bettered. 


It is in this bouse that the mothers of the 
children and wives of the workers gather to 
discuss and be instructed in matters of gen¬ 
eral interest. In fact, the settlement house 
is called ‘‘an advanced department of the fac¬ 
tory,” and extends its work over ten squares 
about it. Out of door art, for instance, is 
debated, and some of the best landscape gar¬ 
deners in the country have visited Dayton for 
the purpose of giving advice. Seeds have been 
distributed to 460 children in Cleveland, in 
the hope that they will do as much for the 
improvement of that smoky settlement as the 
children have done for the improvement of 
Dayton. ‘‘Begin with flowers and cleanliness 
follows, because the people will not be clean.” 
It is declared that the children who attend the 
schools and classes in and near the House of 
Usefulness are brighter than those in other 
parts of the city. The poor people of the 
vicinity have shown a marked gain in clean¬ 
liness and manners since the reforms went 
into effect. When a boys’ brigade was estab¬ 
lished—now numbering over 100 members, and 


Instructed by an officer of the National Guard 
—it was decided to give them a few days in 
camp. Now, to an average boy, living in a 
tent is the next thing to living in heaven, and 
playing soldier is better than anything else 
on earth, except traveling with a circus. 
Great, therefore, was the astonishment of the 
officers when not a single boy appeared at 


the railroad station prepared to go to camp. 
It was found soon afterward that these chil¬ 
dren of the poor were so ignorant that they 
did not know what a camp was, and had never 
been on a railroad train. Scouts were sent 
through the town, the boys were collected 
and they went to camp, to their eventual and 
consuming joy, and whenever they have a 
chance to go under canvas nowadays nothing 
but locks and keys would keep them away. 
The fact that their camp is sixty-eight mlle& 
away is all the more inducement to go to it, 
because a boy who has been sixty-eight miles 
from home and acquired freckles is a traveler. 


NEW KIND OF The Sunday school, 

which overflows from 

SUNDAY SCHOOL, the factory hall into 

the House of Usefulness, is not exactly what 
people understand by that term. It has a relig¬ 
ious foundation, but there is no sectarian bias. 
The teaching is Christian and ethical, but aa 
















Mot)F;RN altruistic industrial experiments. 


f5T 


broad that Jews attend it, and both Prot¬ 
estants and Catholics are found together. 
The school has 800 members, and they listen 
to prayer and have responsive readings, but 
much of the time is taken up with music and 
with talks, frequently illustrated by the ster- 
eoptlcon, on history, biography, travel, health 
and science. The young people are asked to 
bring into their classes ‘‘the best thought of 
the week,” the best and most quotable thing 
they find in their reading, if they do not con¬ 
sider that they have anything original worth 
offering, and at Christmas the one who has 
secured the largest and best collection of 
thoughts gets a little bigger present than the 
others. The prizes on that day amount to $25 
In value. The work of this school is being 
supplemented In all directions. A while ago 
a lesson in etiquette was given by the dea- 


holds its meetings in the evening and listens 
to addresses from mayors, governors, travel¬ 
ers and industrial experts, afterward engaging 
In discussions that show originality and 
brightness of thought. ^ 


HOME-OWNING 
IS ENCOURAGED. 


In the round of the 
shops one will look 
in at the pretty 
vine covered cottage 
where the officers and guests of the company 
lunch at a round table 18 feet across, the cen¬ 
ter of it a little forest of ferns and palms, each 
chair bearing on a silver-plate the name'of 
Its occupant—a house that is also used for 
meeting of club committees and school teach¬ 
ers; at the bicycle sheds, entered through a 
green arch, where the hundreds of wheels used 
by the employes are cleaned and cared for, 
and the tires inflated; at the engine room. 



BACK YARDS OF K STREET HOMES, ADJOINING THE FACTORY. 


coness, and it showed that it had its effect 
when, at the conclusion, every young woman 
In the company shook hands with her and ex¬ 
pressed her pleasure in being present. So in¬ 
terested are the young people in these schools 
and classes and clubs that many of them pre¬ 
fer getting up an entertainment of their own 
to going to a theater or to an entertainment 
provided by strangers. 

It was early realized by the officers and their 
lieutenants that the best way to stimulate 
their employes to learning and industry was 
to provide examples of their benefits. Many 
people do not want an education. At least, 
they do not want it enough to sacrifice any 
of their time or their pleasures tor it. They 
never read anything but papers, and the worse 
the papers are the better they like them. 
Then must have put before them in concrete 
form the benefits resulting from education, 
that they may be stirred to emulate their 
seemingly more fortunate brethren. There 
must be appreciation before there is effort. 
People do not want what they have not seen 
or heard of. 

The Women’s Century Club, composed of 
the girls and women employed in the factory, 
ts allowed to take half of its meeting time at 
the expense of the company twice a month. 
It has been federated with the state and na¬ 
tional women’s clubs, it is addressed by people 
of promise in science, letters and the econom¬ 
ics and has discussions, lectures and debates 
on li.nportant and interesting subjects. Some¬ 
what similar is the Men’s Progress Club, that 


where the big machine that is the heart of the 
works, is painted white and gold, as an in¬ 
ducement to cleanliness. But especially will 
the visitor notice the houses of the factory 
people, and incidentally of others, environing 
the works. None of these homes is owned by 
the company. The people are encouraged to 
own their own. They differ from the custom¬ 
ary house in a factory district in that they 
stand in what is almost a park. Everywhere 
are flower gardens, lawns, shade trees and the 
house fronts are draped with vines. The tele¬ 
graph and telephone poles, which are the 
ugliest things in our city streets, are painted 
and partly concealed with vines. The fences 
are disappearing, and where they remain they 
serve as trellises for ivy, morning glory, moon 
flower and so on. 

When the reforms began in this district, 
about six years ago, , it was found that three 
hoodlums were largely responsible for the dis¬ 
credit into which Slidertown—now South Park 
—had fallen. Lots in that region were $500 
apiece, while three miles away they cost $2,- 
000. Mr. Patterson’s conclusion was that 
three bad boys could damage real estate val¬ 
ues in a given district to the extent of $30.- 
000. Their sphere of influence extended for 
about a third of a mile around the factory. 
The cost of a loafer and rowdy to the com¬ 
munity, was, therefore, $10,000, aside from 
what he might eventually cost if he did not 
reform, and called in the services of police¬ 
men, judges, juries, pallers, almshouse keep¬ 


ers and executioners. If a bad boy was worth 
$10,000 it was decided that a good boy ought 
to be worth more. A good boy is one who 
is occupied. If he begins good he is likely to 
stay so. It he is bad until he is 40 he is 
probably destined to remain bad and to get 
worse as long as he lives, which, fortunately 
for the community and himself, will not be 
long; for the wicked cease from troubling at 
a comparatively early age. 

Mr. Patterson, therefore resolved to interest 
the boys In some thing and to stimulate their 
habits of. industry. So a system of gardening 
was begun that resembles in some respect the 
vacant lot gardening of Detroit and Brooklyn, 
but that showed better results in detail, for the 
boys proved to be enthusiastic agriculturists 
and worked, at first for the prizes, and from 
emulation of one another, but afterward from 
sheer love of the work. Lectures were given 
and many pictures were shown, for purposes 
of instruction; gardeners were employed to 
teach the young farmers, and landscape gar¬ 
deners were summoned to instruct the house 
owners at the same time in the correct prin¬ 
ciples of ornamental planting. Prizes ag¬ 
gregating $50 were and, are yearly offered for 
the best effects in landscape gardening, $30 
for the best kept premises, $28' for the best 
yards kept by children, $15'for the'best win¬ 
dow boxes, over $50, beside magazines and 
honorable mentions for the best boys’ gardens, 
$25 for the best planted premises along the 
line of railroads and $25 for the best kept farm 
house premises in the county. 

The moral effect of this, work has been ex¬ 
cellent, and the esthetic results are not to 
be lightly considered. Every city in the 
Union might take a lesson from Dayton, and 
every city in the Union needs to do so. It 
might also Interest its boys in gardening and 
farming and thus try to turn some of them 
back from the ovfercrowded cities to the health 
and freedom of the country. The boys’ gar¬ 
dens occupy a stretch of ground owned by the 
Cash Register Company, and each boy has a 
strip measuring 10 by 130 feet. There are 
more applicants than gardens, and the fam¬ 
ilies of the boys profit by their efforts, since 
all the fruits and vegetables go to those who 
raise them. In several cases the boys raised 
enough to supply their families with vegetable 
food for the entire year. Seeds, tools and all 
needed appliances were provided by the com¬ 
pany. Johnny Bower, who took the first 
prize, produced results that might well as¬ 
tonish veteran farmers. On a four by ten 
foot strip of his farm he raised fifty-eight 
dozen radishes and a barrel of lettuce. 

Such are the activities that in this instanc* 
have changed the character of the workers and 
turned them from a dull, complaining, unin¬ 
terested company to bright, active, contented, 
cheerful men and women; better still, have 
spread their influence beyond the local envir¬ 
onment, and even made their efflelency known 
beyond, the sea. There is no longer idling 
and gossip in working hours, because the 
strength is not taxed and the hours are brief. 
There is no longer shirking and carelessness, 
because the operative realizes that such con¬ 
duct does not pay him any better than it pays 
his employers. There are no longer grime and 
dirt and foulness, but in their places cleanli¬ 
ness and light—a light of a new dispensa¬ 
tion; the light of Kindness; the dawn of th* 
day of universal brotherhood. 
























THE BICYCLE TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


When the wooden nut- 
AS TO meg works In Hartford, 

i|ApTpApr% Conn., failed, in 1852, the 

rlAnlrUnU. ingenious Yankees looked 

about for something to do, for they did not 
■want the other Yankees in New Haven and 
Bridgeport to get ahead of them in commerce 
or industry. Luckily for them. Colonel Sam 
Colt had just received a big order for re¬ 
volvers and had no fit place to make them in. 
It was Hartford’s good luck that led him to 
fix on that place for his firearms factory— 
one of the biggest in the world—and this 
brought in other Yankees who set up other 
shops, and now you find a rubber mill, motor 
carriage works, several breweries and foun¬ 
dries and factories for making metal tub- 


It is a to-wn with a history, too. Yml re¬ 
member how Jacobus Van Curlet, the Dutch 
general, was surprised by a delegation of 
slab-sided Yankees from Wethersfield, while 
he and his garrison were taking their after¬ 
noon nap in their fort of Goed Hoop, at Hart¬ 
ford, and ignominlously accelerated toward 
New Amsterdam with kicks. The Psalm 
singing, ale swigging Puritans behaved as 
unconscionably toward these placid people as 
their descendants are behaving toward Van 
Curlet’s relatives in South Africa at this 
moment. Then, Hartford has libraries, and 
seminaries and public schools unrivaled for 
size and excellence, and is the seat of Trinity 
College, nobly founded on a rocky height over¬ 
looking a valley that is a dream of loveliness. 


pie. Where the place begins with a mill and 
draws accretions of other mills and collateral 
Industries it may be for years a stupid, heavy, 
unclean, impoverished settlement, the schools 
and libraries and parks and playgrounds not 
appearing until a measure of wealth and rest 
have been earned. It is otherwise w'hen the 
Industry is established in a city already fur¬ 
nished with schools, museums, galleries, 
books, parks, gardens, theaters and with ade¬ 
quate police and health protection. The peo¬ 
ple in the last instance have resources; their 
ambitions are roused for their children; they 
seek to copy the examples that thrift and 
learning and industry have set before them. 

Hartford, therefore, is a place where one 
may draw inspirations. There is no more 







MAIN BUILDINGS. 


Ing, arms, typewriters, screws, tools, harness, 
chucks, electric fixtures, wire mattresses, 
drop forgings, pipes and, most important of 
all, bicycles. Hartford is the place yhere 
they make the Columbia and the Hartford 
bicycles. Hartford, moreover, is a financial 
cehter, and the site of the charter oak. It 
has insurance companies on every street and 
is the richest town in America for its size. 
There are 80,000 people in the city, and sev¬ 
eral of the citizens have had their names in 
the papers at one time and another: Mark 
Twain, Charles Dudley Warner, Thomas 
Hooker, Horace Wells, Edmimd Clarence 
Stedman, Dr. Bushnell, Harriet Beecher 
Stowe, Professor Stowe, Mrs. Sigourney, Sen¬ 
ator Joe Hawley, William Gillette, Otis Skin¬ 
ner, Dudley Buck, General Franklin, Dr. Gat¬ 
ling, Marshall Jewell, Gideon Welles and Arba 
Lanktoa. Arba, he runs a Total Abstinence 
•lid Anti-Tobacco Tabernacle and sells salve. 


It also has churches, and spring floods, when 
the down-towners row home instead of walk¬ 
ing and sit on their second floor window sills 
smoking their pipes and dabbling their heels 
in the Connecticut River and bragging that 
the flood this year is three inches higher than 
last. 

What have these matters to do with bi¬ 
cycles? Much. They create local pride; that 
pride creates the demand for education and 
progress; education makes wiser workmen, 
and good mechanics do better work and draw 
better wages than dull ones. 

There is an atmosphere about a place like 
Hartford that impresses you immediately, and 
is as different as may be from the air of so 
many towns in New' England, where life is 
maintained in such hard terms in mills, and 
where the people have no ideals. History 
likewise determines to a large extent the 
manner of a town and character of its peo- 


beautiful city in the land. The people keep 
out of flats just as long as they can endure 
the servants, and there are miles on miles 
of streets in which one sees not a single 
block or double house. The homes stand back 
fifteen or twenty feet from the walk, they 
are entirely surrounded by lawns and gar¬ 
dens, there are shade trees in front, and not 
a fence in sight. It is like a vast park. The 
disappearance of the fence, which kept peo¬ 
ple out of one another’s yards, and made it 
bothersome for tramps and burglars to go 
around to the back door, implies a mutual 
trust that is a sort of socialism, and is an 
American idea, distinct from the English ex¬ 
clusiveness that shuts itself behind stone 
walls ten feet high, and strews broken bottles 
along the top. With the extension of streets 
has come the need for new parks, and her* 











































69 


THE BICYCLE TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


local pride has again asserted itself In gifts 
of valuable lands to the public. 

TUP RICYPI C Albert A. Pope, 

DiUTLLt tjje head of the bicycle 

COLONY. works, has recently trans¬ 

ferred to the city a park 
of about a hundred acres, near his factory. 
And the bicycle business, having brought In¬ 
to town some thousands of working people, 
several miles of streets and a postal station 
have recently been added on their account. 
Among the most attractive homes are a few 
that the officers of the bicycle company built 
almost across the way from their big shops. 
Some of these homes are rented by employes. 

One remarkable fact Impresses Itself on the 
visitor, and that is, there are no liquor sa¬ 
loons near the works. In most places the 
groggery follows, almost as a matter of 
course, the erection of a factory, but here 
the residence section begins just across the 
street. The factories are not unsightly, for 
they have lawns before them, and the brick 
walls in summer are almost covered by Japan 
Ivy. It does not follow, because there are 
no saloons close by, that the men do not 
drink, if they please, but it does follow that 
they are not continually running away or 
Inventing errands that will take them to the 
saloon. An officer of the company says that 
in all the years he has been there he has 
never seen a drunken man in the shops. 

It is hardly necessary to speak of bicycles. 
Most people know them. Hartford has trol¬ 
leys and third rail and steam cars, and horses, 
but it has asphalted and macadamized its 
streets—Colonel Pope was the leader in the 
good roads movement—and everybody rides 
nowadays. It is said that there is less riding 
in the cities than there was three or four 
years ago, but this does not square with the 
allegation that more bicycles are now made 
and sold than ever, and certainly these Hart¬ 
ford shops are humming with Industry. Some¬ 
where about the place they have a bicycle 
museum, containing not merely the high or¬ 
dinaries, but velocipedes of 1865, with wooden 
wheels like a truck and iron work that 
brought its weight up to a hundred pounds; 
and there is even an old hobby horse, which 
was the ancient predecessor of the bicycle. On 
this there are no pedals. The rider merely 
straddled and kicked his way along by touch¬ 
ing his toes to the ground. These facts are 
known to most people, but it is not as well 
known that pneumatic tires were invented in 
England in 1845 by a man named Thompson, 
who applied them to a wagon weighing over 
half a ton and covered them with an outer 
casing of leather. There is not ’ much that 
is new. Next time you go to Warwick, Eng¬ 
land, ask the Earl to show you his revolvers 
and he will bring out four or five that were 
made somewhere about the time of Henry 
V or VI. 

Colonel Pope, who got his title in the Army, 
by the by, during the Civil War, placed his 
first orders for bicycles with the Weed Sew¬ 
ing Machine Company that occupied the old 
Sharp rifle factory. People needed bicycles 
BO much more than they needed sowing ma¬ 
chines that it was not long before the bicycle 
company had taken sole possession of the 
buildings, and in the course of time related 
factories had been established for the making 
of rubber tires, of nickel steel tubing, a sep¬ 
arate factory was built for the construction 
of the second grade machines, and later came a 
shop where they make horseless carriages. All 
this happened in about eight or nine years, 
and it is less than five years since the indus¬ 
tries were concentrated at Hartford. Given 
an industrial core and the related business 
that will grow about it is surprising. Simple 
•8 a bicycle appears, it requires steel, nickel. 


wood rims, rubber tires, leather saddles, bells, 
cork handles, lamps, wicks, cement, and spe¬ 
cial machines to make its various parts, and 
if these are not bought in the neighborhood, 
where they will not cost too much, they 
will in time be made on the premises. The 
bicycle trust has separated the Industries in 
Hartford, however, so that the tubing works 
and the rubber mill are no longer directly in 
the same family with the shops in which the 
Columbia and Hartford wheels are made. 


In eight years the company, which was re¬ 
cently merged into the larger corporation 
knowx as the trust, hired 3,000 new employes, 
who are the support of 9,000 people. The 
city is, therefore, larger by at least that num¬ 
ber than It was before Colonel Pope’s inter¬ 
ests began. In the Columbia factory, where 
600 men were employed in 1896, there were, 
last April, over 3,800 men, who mahe from 
600 to 1,000 bicycles a day. The place where 
the shops have grown up—a city in Itself—is 
west of the Capitol, with its gilded dome and 
its non-political history, for It Is the only cap- 
itol in the United States that was built within 
the appropriation. Almost under the walls of 
the shops, that is, of the whole factory sec¬ 
tion, comprising a mile of buildings, flows 
with alternate spaces of stagnation. Park 
River, euphemized from Pig River. The view 
of this stream, looking up from the Main 
street bridge, is held by some patriots to 
be superior to any in Venice, but the wash¬ 
ing on the overhanging galleries kind of takes 
the romance off. This stream is virtually 
an open sewer, laden with the drainage of a 
factory town some miles away, and so low 
that the slimy stones In its bed are often ex¬ 
posed. Now, whether the sun takes the mis¬ 
chief out of this distributor of malaria, or 
what happens, it is said to be a fact that the 
health of the men and women who work be¬ 
side this water, with its various unattractive 
qualifications, is better than the average 
health elsewhere in the city. After leaving 
the factories it runs through Bushnell Park 
and a part of the tenement district, and emp¬ 
ties into the Connecticut at the point where 
the Dutchmen built their fort. 


There are excellent arrangements in the 
Columbia shop for cleanliness, whatever may 
be the effect of the river. Every man has a 
locker, and key, and beneath it is a faucet 
emptying Into a trough for the first washing 
which is filled with warm water shortly before 
the gongs are struck. In some shops the 
men have to do their washing in the noon 
hour, or after 6 at night, but here they are al¬ 
lowed to take the time before the engines 
stop. They have three minutes in which to 
make their toilets, and the men employed in 
the departments where there Is much oil and 
dust and dirt are allowed seven. Washing 
Is not an option. The men are required to 
leave the premises clean. There are 1,500 
of these lockers and faucets, and the basement 
In which the ablutions are performed is a busy 
place just before the noon hour sounds. Many 
of the employes ride to and from their work 
on bicycles, which the company sells to them 
at a generous discount, and for their accommo¬ 
dation sheds are erected. , 

So far as one might 
guess from their appear¬ 
ance the hands are as de¬ 
cent and average a lot of 
they are physically, for 
they are graduates of the common schools, 
most of them, and there are a good 
many high school men among them. It 
is not so easy to believe that a good many 
of them are church members, yet that is al¬ 
leged of them likewise. All nationalities are 
here, though the majority are Americans. In 
the filing room, a while ago, the ofiicers took 


THE BICYCLE 
WORKMEN. 

fellows morally as 


stock of the help and discovered that thirteen 
nationalities were represented. An average 
wage in this room is $2.50 a day. Taking the 
whole factory through, the Irish, Germans, 
Swedes and Poles are most numerous, after 
the natives. When a man does satisfactory 
work he stays. There is no Inquiry into his 
religion, his politics, his prejudices, or his 
social or domestic relations; he is simply a 
mechanic and keeps his place on condition that 
he does his duty. Some of the men have 
been with the concern from the beginning, 
and some were inherited from the gun and 
sewing machine industries, a few having been 
in the shops for thirty years. There is more 
and more of a tendency to piece work, and 
this incites the men to greater steadiness, 
since an increase in their earnings rests en¬ 
tirely with them. At the same time, there 
are departments in which piece work is im¬ 
practicable, for in them much is done auto¬ 
matically by machines and supervision rather 
than muscular effort is needed. 

lA/UCDr TUIT shops are a good deal 
Wntntl I lit like any other, save in their 

MEN WORK. 

big and full of noise and oil, 
but are well lighted both by the sun and by 
electricity, for there is often a night shift, and 
electricity is manufactured on the premises. 
There are acres and acres of floor and thous¬ 
ands of tons of machinery and appliances 
needed in the building of that most perfectly 
constructed of vehicles, the bicycle. One ele¬ 
ment in the cost of wheels lies in the deli¬ 
cacy and expense of the machinery used to 
make them. Such are the chucking machines, 
and the affair into which fifty-eight sprockets 
are pushed at a time to have their teeth cut: 
an operation effectively done and easily, 
which you cannot say of the cutting of a 
tooth by an infant, since that requires the 
admiring attention of a whole family. Such, 
likewise is the combination of steel and wits 
that shaves a gear shaft into shape and cuts 
off the next length of steel bar under a cas¬ 
cade of brown oil, quite by itself, with nobody 
to look at it. Such are the 32 steel cradles 
that automatically cut teeth on gears; an odd 
sight they present, rocking furiously alone, 
as if there might be a small and fretful cub 
inside that its exhausted parent was trying 
to put to sleep by machinery. There are bits 
of steel in the machine that cut threads on 
forgings so delicate and precise in their con¬ 
struction that it costs three days’ work to 
make one. 

The office, a handsome three story structure, 
is hardly large enough to hold all of the cleri¬ 
cal staff made necessary in the business—a 
staff that has grown in nineteen years to its 
present dimension from a force of four—two 
membe-s of the Pope family and tw’o boys. 
Colonel Pope is a Boston man, but he spends 
a couple of days a week here, and he has 
a suite of apartments in this building. There 
is also a dining room for the officers, and buy¬ 
ers are sometimes entertained at dinner. Back 
of the spacious advertising department is a 
printing office, with a complete plant in which 
the company can get up its pamphlets, circu¬ 
lars and what not, and whence it issues its 
paper. Were it not that the bicycle works 
have been separated by the trust from the 
horseless carriage, rubber and tube factories, 
this printing shop might be caught in the 
same swirl of expansion and become one of 
the largest jobbing offices in the town. It 
hints at the growth of the bicycle business 
when it is said that the book keeping de¬ 
partment in this one factory employs nearly 
forty people, and it takes a dozen clerks with 
as many stenographers to answer the 2,000 or 
more letters that arrive every day. 

The first rough work is done in the forga^ 














THE BICYCLE TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


eo 


where the forks and gears are banged into 
shape by trip hammers. It is the most pic¬ 
turesque corner of the works. Here, in the 
gloom that is ever and again relieved by a 
burst of hot light from the opened door of a 
blast furnace, stand the men, grimy of face, 
stripped for business, peering into the little 
hells of oil fire in which the metal pieces lie, 
lifting them out at the end of tongs, fac¬ 
ing about and putting them into the die 
that lies beneath the terrible hammer. A 
touch on a pedal and down crashes the mass 
with a blow of three tons, which can be in¬ 
creased to twenty tons, if necessary. The 
soft metal is beaten into the die and leaves 
an edge overlapping, which the workman 
chips off with a few taps of a hammer, and 
then deals it. another whack that is almost 


like retorts with charcoal and powdered bone 
about them, and slid into furnaces where the 
carbonizing process they undergo—absorbing 
the carbon from the packing—turns them into 
steel. For some work required of these pieces 
it is better that the smooth outside only 
should be hard, and a broken fragment shows 
the little shell of tough steel that forms over 
the core of elastic iron which gives bounce 
to the pin or bolt and eaves it from break 
under strain. This property is obtained by 
dropping the hot pieces into oil, in chilled 
tanks. 

One leaves some of the rooms with a sort 
of daze. He remembers only long rows of 
machines, grinding, screeching, groaning, and 
a man talking into his ear through the din, 
explaining unexplainable things about drills. 


through a megaphone. It is not the usual 
rumble of heavy machinery, but is a fierce 
treble, shrill and deafening. You would im¬ 
agine that it was the sort of racket that 
would get on a fellow’s nerves and make 
his physician send him to the country, after 
he had lived in it for a few years, but the 
occupants of the room do not appear to be 
distressed. It has become a matter of course 
to them and they are doubtless able to think 
of green fields and pleasant beer gardens 
while they handle the miles of gleaming 
wire that pass through their fingers. For 
this is where the spokes are made. The wire 
is run off rapidly from reels, and that is what 
makes most of the screeching. It passes from 
the spools into machines that not merely 
straighten and cut it into lengths, but put a 



FILING ROOM. 


MEN AND 


deafening at close range. The piece is then 
thrown into a heap of similar parts that are 
awaiting the next process. The Rembrandt 
effects to be seen in this shop of forges are 
something to be remembered. 

You take a dutiful look at 
the two engines, one of 600 

MACHINES. of 

125, that keep things going, 
at the row of boilers, at the sand filters in 
which the fluid that comes through town and 
Is called Park River, is converted into water 
for the boilers, at the dynamo that makes the 
current for the 3,000 electric lights; at the 
various and excellent arrangements for put¬ 
ting out fires—spHnklers, hose, grenades, 
ladders and axes—cough tor a moment among 
the pickling tanks, where the acid cleans the 
forgings of the scale, and look in at the an¬ 
nealing and case hardening room. The pieces, 
%ars, bolts and screws are packed in trough- 


borers, reamers and threaders; the light 
crossed by shafts and columns and belts and 
moving bulks of iron; and oil on his trousers. 
There is a roaring department where hubs 
are drilled; there is a brazing department, 
then a bath room where the brazing is taken 
off and nickel applied to the frames, 
and in the region where chains are 
made is a machine that spins heads on the 
rivets and secures the links, the machine be¬ 
ing moted by a man who has to kick a 
treadle more than 30,000 times a day—they 
say. The youns man who puts bits of felt 
into the center of each chain link, to oil it, 
is said to have achieved a record of 17,000 
links in a day. 

“Now, you’ll get a noise,” says your guide, 
as if you had not encountered any before, 
and he opens a door which ushers you into 
a room filled with a sound as of ten thousand 
swarms of bees, concentrated and delivered 


screw thread on the end. A boy will draw 
a couple of thousand of these spokes in a 
day. The spokes are put into the wheels in 
two seconds, screwed by a machine, but after¬ 
ward trued by hand to correct possible in¬ 
accuracies. 

Here is a machine about the size of a Gor¬ 
don kick press, that makes 1,000 brass nipples 
an hour, sawing them from the blank, squar¬ 
ing, drilling, tapping and countersinking, and 
a lot of turret machines that make screws 
and nuts while nobody is looking. Then 
there is the die room where molds are made 
in blocks of steel, and the room in which 
handle bars are squeezed into shape against 
these dies; there is a model room surrounded 
by a partition, so that nobody shall see what 
is going on in there, because that is where 
new appliances are tested, and their secret is 
guarded until they are rejected or adopted. 
Loose tongued men are not employed In tha4 





















































61 


THE BICYCLE TREST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


room, and they draw larger ^lay than 
that of average mechanics, because they are 
expert and reliable. The drawings are first 
maii In a large light room, bigger by half 
than the average rooms of an architect. The 
general machine shop, for repairs and for 
the test of new devices and making of shop 
supplies keeps seventy men busy, and they 
draw pay ranging from $2.75 to $3.50 a day. 


In one dusty room where a strong odor 
of glue is noticeable and where the men wear 
caps well down over their eyes to keep the 
sparks out, the polishing is done, for every 
piece of a bicycle must be as smooth as it 
is practicable to make it, not merely for 
appearance sake, but because the nickel plat¬ 
ing which secures it against rust, adheres 
best to a polished surface. The metal has 
to be pressed against wheels coated with 
emery in fine powder, the emery being ap¬ 
plied every day by the man with the glue. 
These wheels are of walrus hide, which has 
to come down from the Arctics and which 
costs $2 a pound. A wheel will last you 
twenty-five years. After the plating la ap¬ 
plied in the nickeling vats the metal is again 
polished before a long blower which carries 
off, in an artificial gale, the harmful emery 
dust and bits of cotton ’ waste that would 
otherwise be breathed by the workmen, for 
the wheels in this department are made of 
cotton, and but for the rapidity with which 
they turn—2,600 times a minute—they would 
go to pieces. 


Next comes the enameling, and all the parts 
treated here are rubbed by hand with rotten 
stone, which gives to them a smoothness like 
silk. After a wash in boiling water, a smooth¬ 
ing with emery and another wash with ben¬ 
zine. the first coat is applied. If, after the 
rubbing with rotten stone, any little grain 
of foreign matter or blister appears, the part 
Is sent back to be done over. Four coats of 
enamel are applied and the process requires 
a week, tor there must be a baking after every 
application. The baking is done In big ovem 
to which the men have given rather odd 
names—among them Fanny, May and Miss 
Ada—and in these the frames hang from iron 
bars until they are done. The temperature 
for the last baking is 300 degrees and they 
remain in it for three hours. 

There remain the rooms where 
WORK OF the fixtures are alllgned, me¬ 
chanically, and the assembling 
room, where the wheels are I 
finally put together, the completed parts being 
then in hand. The 10,000 frames that hang 
from racks under the ceiling suggest a cave 
with black stalactites. About 20,000 bicycles 
will be found in stock at a time. Then, after 
the wheel seems to be done, come the inspec¬ 
tions, which have continued through every 
process. The crank, for instance, passes 
through five inspections before it is finally 


EXPERTS. 


in place; and so with forging, machine oper¬ 
ations, nickeling and polishing. There are 
twenty-five Inspectors, whose work it is to 
see that things fit. And, finally, there is a 
testing department in a separate building, the 
presiding genius of which is a youngish man 
in spectacles who knov/s more than anybody 
else on earth. He will take steel to pieces 
and tell you just the proportion of copper , 
that has in some mysterious way smuggled ' 
Itself in, and though there is only a smell of i 
this metal he will extract it and weigh it for I 
you in a machine that' dips when you drop an 
eyelash into it and that informed me that , 
the weight of my autograph in pencil was I 
26 one hundred-thousandths of an ounce. . 
There are others. I have seen their checks. ( 


The names on them were not even as heavy 
as that. 

This youngish man in glasses will also turn 
the water into a testing machine that exerts 
a pull or a compression of 100,000 pounds, 
and he can make it stretch a steel rod until 
It decreases from half to two-fifths on an inch 
and cracks apart under a strain of 14 tons, 
or 100,000 pO'Unds to the square inch. In this 
he tests the strength of samples of steel 
used in the wheels. Next he puts the frames 
into a concern that joggles from side to side, 
in an exaggeration of the motion made in 
pedaling, and at the same time bumps with 
a force of 300 pounds, 300 times a minute, as 
if driving them at high speed against a brick 
wall. A five pound frame has endured this for 
sixty-six conscutive hours. There is a bafliiag 
mystery of fioats, tanks, levels, brakes, weights, 
wheels, iron, wooden things and a lot of 
other accessories which lets you know—If you 
wear spectacles and know everything and can 
do stunts in mathematics—what the amount 
of work is which a rider has to put out in 
overcoming the friction of a bicycl*. Then 
there is a wheel of wood with cogs of unequal 
height and size and distance, which is made 


fact that so many of their children succeed 
where youngsters born to an easier life do 
not. la the recent prize contest in the local 
high school it was noticed that the prizes 
were carried off by sons and daughters of 
mechanics and the children of European 
Jews. 


LITTLE socialism; irburiiui: 
NO ANARCHISM. in Hartford, the 

silver vote being 
trifling, and as to the extremes of doctrine, 
one of the officers of the bicycle works re» 
marked dryly, “We are out of anarchists just 
now.” The men like their employers, apparent¬ 
ly, and with reason. When the war broke out 
with Spain, Colonel Pope told his men that 
all of them who were in the militia regi¬ 
ments, or v/ho wished to volunteer could do 
so with perfect confidence that their jobs 
would be kept for them until they returned, 
provided that they were honorably dis¬ 
charged, and that, moreover, he would in¬ 
sure the life of every such soldier for $1,000. 
A number of the men accepted this opportu¬ 
nity. In dull seasons, when it has been neces¬ 
sary to lay off men, the unmarried ones arc 



THE BRAZING ROOM. 


to represent a rough road, and the bicycle 
frolics over this 162 times a minute, with a 
weight of a heavy man pressing it down. The 
bicycle thus performs a journey of 1314 miles 
an hour over an equivalent of a Brooklyn 
street, with a load of iron representing a fat 
man in the saddle, and keeps it up for 40 or 
50 hours before anything collapses. Then the 
ball bearings are tested, and it has been dis¬ 
covered that when a ball Is too hard it is as 
unserviceable as when it is too soft, and be¬ 
tween times the youngish man subjects 
nickel steel tubing to 6,000,000 revolutions 
with a weight of 67 pounds hanging on it, 
which causes it to sag a quarter of an inch, 
and does other uncanny things with a furnace 
whose heat he can read up to 2,00 degrees in 
a galvanometer. After all these things have 
happened a bicycle can be shipped. 

Although the officers of the Columbia 
Bicycle Company do not in any way interfere 
with the affairs of their men outside of the 
shops, they encourage much that is worthy to 
be encouraged in them. They see with satis¬ 
faction that their home life is decent, that they 
send their children to school, that they seek 
wholesome amusements, that they practice 
thrift, that through the agency of building as¬ 
sociations they are acquiring possession of 
their houses, for these things mean that they 
will be the better workmen. That the blood is 
all right in these mechanics is proved in the 


first dismissed, in consideration for the fam¬ 
ilies of the others. 

A strict business system prevails. Th« 
men as they enter the gate receive their 
time tickets, which are turned in at night by 
their foreman, and they are answerable for 
waste or destruction, but many things ar« 
done for their welfare. Recently a mutual 
benefit company was organized among them 
and it has 300 members already. It pays from 
$1,200 to $1,500 a year in $6 weekly payments 
to men who have been injured or are ill, and 
$50 to the widow in case of death. The dues 
are 25 cents a month only, but funds are in¬ 
creased by occasional benefit entertainments. 
The man must be ill for two weeks before he 
receives a payment and the money is guar¬ 
anteed for thirteen weeks. The musically 
minded have organized an orchestra and 
a brass band. There is an athletic club, 
likewise, that hires a bowling alley In 
the town, and engages in bicycle races 
and other activities, all of which tends to in¬ 
crease what may be termed the esprit de corps 
of the factories. 

Although a good many of the hands go home 
to their dinners, the company has provided a 
large, airy lunch room, where such of them 
as choose can obtain light refection at midday 
at cost price, and where they receive sand¬ 
wiches and such matters free when workin* 



































62 


THE BICYCLE TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


overtime. The following notice hangs in this 
room: “Do not smoke until after 12:15, so 
that all may first eat dinners. Avoid profan¬ 
ity or rude conduct.’’ Bunches of 5 cent tick¬ 
ets are bought at the time-keeper’is office, 
■which are a legal tender in the lunch room, 
and the service of the cook is given by the 
company. A bowl of soup, with bread, costs 
6 cents; so does bread and milk; likewise, a 
stew; pie and cheese, the same; two cups of 
coffee, with sugar and milk, can be had for 
a nickel, and fruit is sold in season. A free 
library is also here for the use of the men, 
as •well as checker and backgammon boards, 
and after they have had lunch they read and 
play games and chat until it is time to go to 
work again. All the leading magazines and 
papers are at their service, and if they wish 
Btrict, quiet they can retire to a room adjoin- 


district of cheap, but not shabby, homes, in 
which rents are moderate and to which access 
is readily gained by train and trolley. The 
newer houses contain baths and furnaces, and 
a few are arranged for two families. 

Not many of the bicycle workers are sub¬ 
jects for sympathy. Even the laborers and 
helpers are not compelled to live in the hov¬ 
els or hives that are found in poorer cities, 
and there is nothing in the town that quite 
corresponds to a New York tenement. The 
city is so loosely built that the air gets in, 
and it is still too small to deny to its residents 
an access to the country. On a pleasant Sun¬ 
day or a light evening you may see many 
men, obviously mechanics, riding and walking 
along the pleasant roads that radiate out 
from the city or trundling off in trolley cars 
to the suburbs. One of the suburbs is Weth¬ 



Ing this hall, where they are also free from 
tobacco smoke. 

Hartford, being a largish 
WUnMIMw town, is not so cheap, in 

MEN’S RENTS. respect of rents, as some 

other places, but there are 
nine room houses in good quarters of the city 
which rent for $30 a month, and there have 
recently come into being some five room flats 
that rent for $15. Many of these flats are in 
quiet and attractive districts, and have strips 
of law'n before them, instead of bumping flat 
against the sidewalk. As the average pay of 
the men in the bicycle factory is $2 a day, a 
$13 rent is poesible to them. One of the first 
recorded attempts to establish a working peo¬ 
ple’s section was made in Hartford more than 
a generation ago, by Colonel Colt, on the 
meadows back of his immense arms factory. 
The houses were in the style of Swiss chalets, 
and were pretty and picturesque, while they 
were new. The rich Milesian brogue heard 
there did not exactly match the archi¬ 
tecture. Later a number of small houses, 
with ample yard room, were built in Park- 
Yllle, a couple of miles or more from town, 
and this region has amplified into a pleasant 


ersfield, famous for its onions and its prison, 
but not many of them go in that direction. The 
poorer of the homes are found on the streets 
that slant down toward the Connecticut Riv¬ 
er. Until thirty years ago these were the res¬ 
idences of mechanics and clerks of the better 
sort, but they have retired to the northward 
and westward under the determined advance 
of a crowd of Italians and Slavs. The streets 
occupied by houses in which the mechanic 
lives, most usually, are quiet and shaded and 
the houses are of brick, two and three stories 
high, with yards in front and a little bed of 
flowers before the w'indows. If you will have 
an example of a mechanic’s home you may 
call on him after hours in his comfortable two 
floors of one of these houses. He lets the low¬ 
er floor to another tenant so as to bring his 
actual outlay for rent down to about $18 a 
month. The apartments are well furnished, 
without any attempt at the spectacular. He 
has a couple of pictures in oil, several engrav¬ 
ings in the taste of his parents, so they are 
heirlooms, no doubt. There are carpets in 
every room and a sewing machine. He has a 
piano, not too young, but still in tune, for his 
oldest daughter takes music lessons. His 
three children attend school and are bright, 


well dressed, well bred and would not appear 
out of place in any house on Fifth avenue. 
This mechanic is an American, hence he does 
not save a great deal, but if he were compell¬ 
ed to quit work he would not be entirely with¬ 
out resource, and he holds the New England 
idea of making his children useful, as soon as 
they have got through their schooling, so that 
in a few years they will not be a charge upon 
him. He is not a member of a church, but he 
frequently attends church service, and sends 
his children to the Sunday school picnics 
every summer. Be does not go in much for 
symphony concerts, because they don’t have 
them, but on great occasions he takes his 
wife to the theater, and his two boys earn 
enough In running errands and such like jobs 
to buy gallery seats when “The Red Rovers of 
the Rondout’’ appear at the theater. He 
takes the papers, of course—do you know any 
American citizen who doesn’t?—and has a 
hundred books. He is not badly off, do you 
think? 


LABOR UNIONS 
NOT STRONG. 


In respect of labor 
unions Hartford is not 
strong. In most. If 
not all, of the big fac¬ 
tories, the men are as well cared for as in 
any shopis in the country, and they hold their 
places for many years. The relations of com¬ 
panies and employes are commonly pleasant. 
A few weeks ago one of the largest manu¬ 
facturers in Ihe city was visited by a delega¬ 
tion from a central labor union with a re¬ 
quest—not a demand—that he reinstate a 
couple of mechanics who had been discharged 
for drunkenness. He received them pleas¬ 
antly, but did not make any concessions. 
“We have spent a lot of time building up 
this business,” he said to the spokesman, 
“and I guess you’d better let us keep on run¬ 
ning it. But I’ve got a little money, and if 
you’ll promise to take hold of the shops here 
and run them as they are run now, and guar¬ 
antee payment to our men, some of whom 
have families and need the pay, why, in that 
case I’ll go back to my lathe. And I can do 
it, for I worked at it a long time. Mind, you 
are to assume all the risks, and learn the com¬ 
mercial end of the business, and fulfill our 
contracts.” 


The delegation hardly considered this prop¬ 
osition; at least, not seriously. “I reckon 
we’re a little too old to learn,” was all that 
the spokesman ventured, and the trouble was 
smoothed over. “We don’t take on any lofty 
air with these men; we simply try to show 
them things as they are,” said the manufac¬ 
turer. He continued: “The problems that 
confront the world to-day arise largely from 
the tendency to overproduction. How are we 
going to rectify this? Not by abolishing ma¬ 
chinery and going back to hand work in any 
purely mechanical output, for that has cheap¬ 
ened the product so as to bring it within reach 
of all and put comforts in everybody’s home. 
No. We will do it by shortening hours. I 
don’t suppose I shall live to see it, but event¬ 
ually six hours will be a day’s work.” 

Thus, industrial conditions themselves may 
create that for which social theorists ar* 
clamoring. 






































































THE GLASS TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


When the Phoenicians, or some of those 
people, were cooking lobsters, or something, 
somewhere, some time, they noticed that 
the pebbles under their cooking pots were 
streaked with a hard, lucent substance 
which was not there before and which their 
digestions told them had never come from 
the lobsters. It was glass, formed by a 
combination of sea sand, which is mostly 
silica, and soda, which had also been dis¬ 
tributed about the premises. In their large 
way they cast aside this source of wealth. 


it was Jonss or Smith who was coming up 
the front steps, and every time you looked 
into a mirror you scared yourself: you had 
so many accidents to your face and so many 
birthmarks that were not there yesterday. 
Window glass is still blown: that is, the 
melted material is taken from a furnace 
on the end of a steel tube and the worker 
blowing at the cool end causes it to inflate, 
like any other bubble. He rolls it on a 
metal table, to smooth it, and when he 
has blown and teased it into a cylinder be 


that it need have taken so many cen« 
uries to think out. All there is to it ia 
this: The melted glass is poured upon a 
steel table, and a steel roller passing over 
it spreads it out into a smooth sheet. Isn’t 
that easy? One of these times some genius 
will devise an equally simple way to utilize 
power from the ocean waves, and another 
one will get up a sleeping car in which you 
can dress like a Christian, and a third 
will invent some scheme to keep legislatures 
from meeting so often, and when we have 
















GLASS WORKS AND COMPANY HOUSES, FORD CITY, PA, 


seeming to care not a Jot that as soon as 
It got over to Pittsburg it >.ould make 
sesterces enough to buy their whole king¬ 
dom, and that, from the manufacturer to 
the glass-put-in man it would yield rev¬ 
enues longer than they knew how to count. 
It is the same glass now that it was then, 
only you can see through it better, unless 
it may be when you are looking out of the 
wrinkled windows of a country tavern, when 
you appear to see men as trees walking. 

It was a great boon when they stopped 
wrinkling windows and mirrors. Until they 
did that you never were quite sure whether 


cuts it down one side, while it is still plas¬ 
tic, and it is then unfolded into a pane. 

This somewhat primitive way of doing 
things will never do for large plates, espe¬ 
cially when it is intended that you shall 
be able to look through them. A man would 
have to be 18 feet high to swing a pipe long 
enough to blow a modern shop window; he 
would need the strength of two Sandows to 
1''; it, and, let him do his best, the glass 
would s'lll be wrinkled and streaked. No. 
Pipes would not do any longer. A new 
method had to be devised. It evolved, pres¬ 
ently, and is not so dreadfully complicated 


all these blessings, and some others, w 
will say, “Well, goodness grievance, it’s all 
so easy I could have thought of it myself.” 
But you didn’t. 


MOST SUDDEN 


Yet, while in the mak¬ 
ing of plate glass the 
r»r Ai I TDIICTC difficulty and expense 

Or ALL I nUo I O. reduced, the 

Increasing demand for it requires an Immense 
capital for its production. That capital has 
been furnished. The business is a trust now, 
like any other, with headquarters in Pitts¬ 
burg and ten factories in various parts of the 
land- Three companies have not been swel- 


























THE GLASS TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


(t4 


lowed, but the trust Is looking at them in a 
threatening tone of voice. It is the most 
sudden trust In this country, because twenty 
years ago the making of glass plate was still 
In its experimental stage in America. We 
Imported our shop and office windows from 
France, Belgium and England. The glass- 
makers prostrated themselvms before Congress 
and swore that they were an infant industry 
and needed protection, and they got it., Con¬ 
gress was tender and could mot endure to see 
this wringing of hands and hear these lamen¬ 
tations,, so it clapped a tariff on foreign glass 
that virtually kept it out of the country, and 
the manufacturers then sent abroad and got 
the people to make glass for them who had 
been making it for their rivals. So that is 
how all the Belgians got here that you find in 
the country about Pittsburg. It is the only 
Industry, is plate glass making, that has 


called Belgians to us. Our international eth¬ 
nographic congress was complete as soon as 
we had persuaded the Belgians. 

Whenever a man wants to make a mess he 
goes to Pittsburg. It seems to be just as nat¬ 
ural for him to do that as it is for one when 
one wants to clean his politics to come to New 
York, or for a man who wants to catch cod¬ 
fish to live in Gloucester. Queer town, Pitts¬ 
burg! It is a place where they read about 
the sun and run excursions into the country 
on Saturdays to see it. When natural gas 
was introduced as fuel and the great smudge 
companies gave over soft coal the look of the 
place was so changed that people were contin¬ 
ually getting lost. They did not recognize 
their own streets. Now they have the soft 
coal back again, and the stranger never knows 
when to get up. Every night, or, it may be, 
afternoon—there is no difference—the Pitts- 
burger, breathing out clouds of soot, is hauled 
by a steel rope up to the suburbs and the 
bosom of his family. When he kisses his 
wife he leaves a black streak on her nose. He 
W'ears fifteen shirts a week, and even then is 
gshamed to meet an old acquaintance from a 


sunlit state, though he knows that under his 
mask of soot he can pass for somebody else, if 
he wants to. And it is that way up and down 
and around—soot in your eyes, soot in your 
lungs, soot in your supper and soot in your 
spirits. There is no more reason why the 
glass works should take the name of Pitts¬ 
burg than there is for fixing the name of New 
York to the studios, and boiler shops in Peek- 
skill. They are forty miles away up the Al¬ 
leghany and.thC; Monongahela... It is only, the 
offices that are in Pittsburg, on the fifteenth 
or twentieth floor of one of Mr. Carnegie’s 
buildings. • 

When you apply for admission to the works 
it Is not granted with cheerfulness, if it is 
granted at all.. 'Visitors are strictly barred 
from all the factories except on an order from 
one of the executive committee, who gives it, 
if he does, as though it , were money. Many 


of these concerns are in a constant fright lest 
somebody should get in and see how things 
are done, and, having learned, should go off 
and start a trust all by himself. And there 
really are scouts who are doing that. They 
tell of a clerical looking person who asked 
permission to go through a rubber mill, and 
who was as green as grass when the attend¬ 
ant was explaining the processes to him. But 
once he stopped before a bin of crude gum and 
asked if he could cut off a little sample. When 
he had received permission he whipped out 
his knife and moistened the blade on his 
tongue. 

“Hold on, there,” cried the attendant, seiz¬ 
ing him by the slack portions of his raiment 
and rushing him through the nearest door. 
“You’re no greenhorn. A man who knows 
enough about rubber to wet his knife when 
he’s going to cut it. can’t go through this 
shop.” 

PI ACC TDIICT 

uLAoo I nUoT trade secrets lying about 
LEAST LIKED. the plate glass works, 

and, even if they did, it 
would cost a good deal to put them to use. 
You would either have to start a rival com¬ 


pany at a vast expense or sell the trick back 
to the trust. 

Of all the big industrial alliances, the plate 
glass trust appears to be held in least affec¬ 
tion, but the reason for this is, with hardly 
a doubt, that just at present its shops are not 
running on full time. This is a result of 
temporary conditions that are likely to be 
removed at any day. Yes, there are other 
reasons, too, though they are not very good 
ones. They are that the company pays the 
lowest rates in the glass business, because its 
people are foreigners and employs foreigner* 
because they will accept the lowest rates. 
Also, it is emphatic against trades unions and 
will not only have nothing to do with them, 
but will not permit them to be formed on its 
premises. As an offset to these remarks. It 
may be stated that the rates are low because 
the labor is the least skilled of that in an]' 
of the glass industries; that the foreigners 
who came here to start the works were the 
only-ones at the time-who could make plate 
glass and that as to the trades unions, these 
people care little to ,go into them, because 
they mean only an expense and not a penny 
of advantage. 

At Charleroi the factory where plate glass 
is made is running on full time. Charleroi! 
That’s an odd name for an American town, 
especially on the edge of the coke and oil 
district. It is a token of the Belgian occu¬ 
pation, for hundreds of these fellows came 
from Charleroi, in Belgium, - which is a sort 
of little Pittsburg, with steel mills and foun¬ 
dries and places that get up smells and 
strikes, and it is the center of the glass indus¬ 
try of the pocket kingdom. Until the works 
at Ford City started, both the American and 
the Belgian Charleroi bragged of the largest 
plate glass Industries on their respective con¬ 
tinents, but Europe is outdone at last by Ford 
City. Charleroi is a glass town, in fact, for 
here are not only the shops of the plate glass 
company, but the bottle blowing establish¬ 
ment of the Hamilton Company and the lamp 
chimney factory of Macbeth & Co. People are 
freely admitted to the bottle factory, but are 
barred from both of the others, except on a 
special permit. 

With possibly no exception, Charleroi is the 
muddiest place on earth. To be sure. Ford 
City has many claims to supremacy in this 
respect, and in trying to wrest the prize from 
Charleroi a good deal of bitterness has de¬ 
veloped between the towns, but Ford City, 
though its mud may be a few inches deeper, 
has to admit that the Charleroi mud is more 
numerous and that it clings more firmly. The 
pedestrian has to find a fence or a board walk 
or a native or a rock or something every few 
yards in his career and scrape himself free. 
If one is able to walk a quarter of a mile, his 
feet on a damp day will be that time weigh 
from thirty to fifty pounds apiece, and it is 
said that there are Instances in which men 
have tried to cross fields and have accumu¬ 
lated so much clay around their feet that they 
were anchored until the next rain. You will 
say that Ais has nothing to do with the glass 
industry. Well, it hasn’t a good deal, but it 
shows what sort of people make glass, doesn’t 
it, when they haven’t enough dissatisfaction 
to remedy such a state of things? There are 
occasional sidewalks in the town, but they 
are unanimously of wood and out of repair, 
and when one steps from them into the 
street on a frosty or snowy day, in order to 
avoid slipping on the greasy boards, he i* 



IN THE PLATE GLASS ’WORKS AT CHARLEROI, PA. 
























































THE GLASS TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


Go 


liable to elide furiously down hill in the mud, 
Instead. It is very sad. 

_ . I _ Now, here’s a queer 

PAID» thing to start with, 
LEAST MORAL about this place; the 

cheapest people in it 
are the most moral. We have fallen into a 
way in the cities of charging most of the 
crimes and vices upon the poor, and the tene¬ 
ments are synonymous with everything that 
is evil. But in Charleroi the best paid people 
are the drunkards and most careless in their 
money affairs. If you doubt it ask the hotel 
men and shopkeepers and the police. They 
all narrate the same story. They tell you 
that it is the bottle and chimney blowers who 
make the most trouble for the town, and the 
Belgians who make the least. The Belgians 


own beer and wine. California wine 
sells in California for 12 cents a gal¬ 
lon wholesale, and when it reaches the East 
it sells for 30 cents a pint in the restaurants. 
As the commoners say, this is too rich for the 
blood of our friend from over the water, so 
he buys grapes when they are cheapest, and 
squeezes the juice out, and ferments it and 
when it is fermented he knows what to do 
with it. Occasionally these men form a 
syndicate and buy a quantity of grapes, and 
last fall they purchased a whole car load. 
So there will be wine enough in the house 
presently to last through several Sundays. 
One of the plate men bought 400 pounds of 
grapes on his own account. The people also 
gather elderberries that grow wild in the 
vicinity and make wine out of them. All 


down to a frayed shirt, which is left unbut¬ 
toned, and a pair of trousers of a texture and 
appearsnce that recall the minstrel joke of 
summer clothes and some are not clothes. 
And they wear shoes, for the floor is warm 
and is sprinkled with threads and crusts 
and lumps of glass. Sweat pours from them 
in streams, for this is really a place where 
one earns his bread by the sw'eat of his brow. 
After the furnace doors are closed and the 
Interior of the cavern is all aglow you may 
look in through a little window, but you wiil 
need a shield of wood and blue glass if you 
are to look for more than a few seconds. 
These shields are in general use, for the 
ovens have to be inspected every now and 



HOMES OF THE GLASS WORKERS, FORD CITY, PA. 


brought a lot of dirt and meanness with 
them, but they brought honesty and a fre¬ 
quent addiction to sobriety. The glass blow¬ 
ers are Irish and American. The glass plate 
makers are Belgian, Polack and black and 
white American. The blower is accounted 
a poor man at his trade if he cannot make 
$5 a day, and in the Hamilton factory he not 
Infrequently makes $9. Out of this he must 
pay his helper, who is commonly a child, and 
sometimes he pays two helpers; but his clear 
gain is $35 and $40 a week, if he is a skilled 
man. Yet he goes on toots, he falls in ar¬ 
rears for groceries and rent, people call him 
a bilk and a bum, and every now and then 
he goes whooping to the police station with 
gyves about his wrist. 

The $2 Belgian views with alarm and keeps 
on not making more than $2. Not but that 
this unusual import can drink, for he does, 
and he can drink copiously; but he seems 
to possess the marvelous faculty of knowing 
when he has enough, and he never attempts 
to crowd two cubic feet of alcohol into 
a one foot stomach. Another peculiar 
thins about him is that he makes hU 


their drinks, both beer and wine, are light, 
and they use strong spirits in moderation, 
when at all. It is Pennsylvania whisky that 
raises the deuce with the other folks. 

A walk through the vast and shadowy 
halls where the glass is made, in Char¬ 
leroi, does not show many of these 
Belgians. They are in the lighter rooms 
where the plates are ground and pol¬ 
ished. The men who shovel in the mixture 
of sand, limestone, soda, soda ash, arsenic, 
charcoal and salt that is presently to become 
glass are Huns, Italians, Germans, Slovaks 
and Poles, and their work is that of the la¬ 
borer. There are 600 people here, altogether, 
of whom 150 are Americans. Ten acres are 
under roof and the yards cover seventeen 
acres more. The hardest looking work in the 
place is not very well paid. It is that of 
filling the huge clay pots in the melting fur¬ 
naces. The mixture must be shoveled in at a 
door from which there Issues a fierce red 
glare and a heat so withering that nothing 
is to be compared with it except an August 
day in New York. Yet the men do not seem 
to mind it. They never faint. They strip 


then to see whether or no the glass is suf¬ 
ficiently cooked. 

_ _ _ When the glass is 

WORKERS WEAR ready for pouring, 
WOODEN MASKS. the skimmers, who 

take off the crust of 
slag from the surface of the pots, have to 
wear wooden masks with a peep hole through 
them. But for these their faces would be 
peeled by the heat. When gathered about 
the pots they suggest South Sea Islanders or 
Alaskans ready for a war dance. An electric 
crane, traveling up and dow'n in the dim, ir¬ 
religious light, grasps the pot of glass in a 
long iron arm and carries it to the steel table, 
where the plate is to be laid. Laying con¬ 
sists in tipping the pot and letting the glass 
run out. It has to be done sprily, for it 
cools fast and there is a busy company about 
the lavalike mass as it pours over the steel, 
lighting the beams high overhead with a ruddy 
glow, for the heavy roller now begins to move 
and the edges of the pancake must be slicked 
up so as to make little waste, while other 
bits are to be sheared off into comparatively 
straight edges In a few moments after the 
































































THE GLASS TRUST AND ITS .EMPLOYES. 


ee 


roller has passed over It the glass cools down 
to a cherry red and then loses its color entire¬ 
ly. Now the steel table is run along a rail¬ 
road until it is brought opposite to one of 
the annealing kilns and is connected with the 
edge of that oven. A dozen layers then pro¬ 
duce long poles of metal, which they place 
against the still hot plate and with a rush 
that suggests a bayonet charge, the half ton 
plate is pushed into the luminous recess. 
There it will stay for three or four days, the 
heat being gradually shut oft. Without this 
annealing process the glass would be loo 
brittle. 

After an oven has sufficiently cooled a man 
crawls into it with a much bent back and 
With pads on bis hands and knees to attach a 


by Belgian women, who go upon their knees 
for the purpose and scraije and maul as if 
they were scrubbing floors. Lastly the plate 
must pass the inspector, and it is now placed 
upright in a strong light and every inch of It 
is carefully examined. Wherever a bubble, 
a flaw, a crack is found a chalk mark is made 
around it and if the defect is close to the 
surface it can be ground and polished out, 
for the plates are over a quarter of an inch 
thick and will endure some grinding; but it 
the spot or crack is large, or threatens the in¬ 
tegrity of the plate, it is cut out altogether, 
and the plate is, therefore, divided into 
smaller pieces. Some tiny bubbles are passed 
for plate glass that would not be tolerated if 
the panes were intended for mirrors. The 




WHERE THE BELGIANS LIVE, CHARLEROI, PA. 


hook and chain to the farther end of each 
plate. The layers then haul it out and put it on 
the steel bed for trimming. This is done by a 
man with a glazier’s diamond, who goes over 
it, scratching ana chipping at the rough edges 
and flawed spots until the sheet is rudely sym¬ 
metrical, and the chips are cast aside for 
melting over. The heavy plate is then lifted 
by a gang and is carried, with considerable 
address, into the grinding hall. The plate Ir 
not lifted to their shoulders. On the contrary, 
it is carried edgewise and upright by straps 
passing underneath, the men leaning toward 
one another on opposite sides of the glass and 
keeping step in their march. 

The grinding is done upon huge revolving 
wheels to which the glass is fastened. As 
they turn, horizontally, they press the glass 
against buffers charged with sand, which 
grind off the Jogs and wavy spots. .■V still 
finer grinding follows on wheels that are 
more lightly and cautiously charged with 
emery, which the attendant throws on in little 
dabs from a cup tVater is constantly 
flowing over the glass and carrying off 
the chips and grains that have been removed. 
When the plate has been made smooth 
It is almost transparent if wet, but people can 
not have their windows wet all the time in 
order to see through them, so they must be 
polished. They are, therefore, removed to 
tables that move slowly from side to side un¬ 
der the jigging of a number of buffiing wheels 
charged with rouge, that revolve over every 
part of the surface and give a high luster to 
it. The plate must be cemented upon the bed 
before it undergoes this operation. 


When the polishers 
are through with it 
there are frequently 
to be found little 
spots of slag, or surface bubbles or cracks, 
and when these are discovered the plate goes 
to another table to have them scoured out 


WOMEN FINISH 
THE POLISHING. 


boxing of these sheets of glass is compact, 
but there is less use of paper and padding 
than one expects to see. Either the glass en¬ 
dures harder knocks than we suppose or else 
the freight handlers on the railroads have 
tired of slamming it around with all their 
might to hear it jingle, and now treat it with 
something of the reverence they give to a 
trunk. 

The Macbeth and Hamilton companies use 
natural gas in their factories, but the plate 
glass company, though it owns a gas w’ell, 
finds it too fluctuant and uncertain; hence it 
makes its own gas on the spot by roasting it 
out of coal; and it also owns the coal. The 
coal grows on the spot. It seems a round¬ 
about way of doing, to burn coal in order to 
extract the gas, for the heat of the burning is 
wasted; but the heat, in the melting ovens 
from gas is stronger than from coal,, and 
there is no appearance of foreign material in 
the product. The coal is reduced to ash and 
cinders in the extraction of the gas, and tall 
chimneys carry off the fumes. This failure 
In the gas supply is destined to change the 
look of things before long. Soft coal will be 
burned when the gas gives out and the air 
which is clear, in spots, along the river val¬ 
leys, will become thick and sooty, as it is in 
Pittsburg. The results where smoke is cre¬ 
ated are picturesque, and that is the best one 
can say for it. It has turned the Mononga- 
hela into the most spectacular of rivers, at 
least at night. The darkness mercifully 
shuts from view the miserable hovels of the 
steel workers and the bulks of the mills and 
foundries and tipples are relieved against a 
sullen glare. You see the red glow of steel 
Ingots, the flare of cupolas, the eyes of ovens, 
kilns and forges blinking, arc lights flashing 
and converters lighting the clouds and river 
with geysers of white flame shot into the air 
for a hundred feet and falling back in show¬ 
ers of sparks. If ever you go to Charleroi you 


can ascend the river by train, and return to 
Pittsburg by boat, and there is no other river 
trip like it. If you cannot secure passage on 
some of the regular steamers at night, maybe 
they will let you ride on the Little Fred, or 
the Mike, or the Dick, or the Voyager, or the 
Jim Brown—stern wheels of light draught, 
and not rivals to the Puritan and Priscilla. 

Along the Monon- 

FILTHOFTHE gahela you see the 

COMPANY HOUSE rS.TisS 

be said for the glass workers that they live 
better than hundreds of the laborers In the 
steel mills. There are rows of barracks 
in Black Diamond and Homestead that 
are meaner than city tenements. They are 
blots on American civilization. It is true 
they are occupied by Poles, Huns, Slovaks 
and Italians, who have no knowledge of 
cleanliness and no wish fpr what they do not 
know; but in heaven’s name,’ let the com¬ 
panies that own the houses take the matter 
in their own hands and scrape away the 
outer accumulations of filth, that there may 
be at least a hypocrisy of decency. Argument 
and explanation are of no avail in such a 
case. The companies are culpable. 

Charleroi might be as unpleasant a place aa 
the steel district down the river, if it wera 
not tha* it is less crowded. The houses are 
mostly of wood, a story and a garret In 
height, and are dingy outside and in. It Is 
surprising that'the French and Belgians show 
no more disposition to cleanliness than the 
Huns and Italians. The porches are unswept, 
the fences are out of plumb and are lacking 
in pickets—odd that the thought of re¬ 
moving them altogether and converting the 
front yards into lawns has not occurred to 
any one! there is an alley,behinfl most.of the 
rows which presents a vista of dirty sheds, 
outhouses, hen coops and rubbish; the yards 
themselves are littered and the streets are 
awful with their rickety board walks and 
their pools of mud. Indoors one finds a few 
of the amenities, most usually in the shape of 
furniture of American make—the kind that 
Installment men like to sell, and a few cheap 
prints or chromos. Except in the best room, 
where there is one. carpets are not common. 
Even the table and kitchenware are poor and 
nicked and rusty. Most of these houses have 
been owned by a land company that was at 
first cn offshoot of the glass company. A 
house with four rooms rents for $7.50, a five 
room house for $8, and there are two'story 
brick houses on a hill which one may rent how 
tor $10, although the price used to be $18. 
Most of the people affect to feel aggrieved by 
what they term the high rentals. They have 
had little experience of the towns, apparently. 

It must not be supposed that the people are 
wretched, because they are not. They live 
as they lived in their own country, and either 
save the difference between the cost of their 
necessities and their Incomes or else they go 
to the saloon ,.nd have fun with it. The Bel¬ 
gians are not ill looking or ill acting fellows. 
There are some big men with black beards 
and square shoulders, who are fine types. 
Usually their wives are frowsily dressed; and 
they stay about their homes, like most women. 
The children are sturdy little beggars, red 
cheeked, bright eyed, coarsely dressed, to be 
sure, and not invariably bathed on Saturday 
night. Now and again you will find one of 
these shavers with his suspenders outside of 
a sweater, looking for all the world like a 
little Dutchman in Maarken and needing only 
a pair of wooden shoes to complete the like¬ 
ness. 

The Belgians are regarded as good family 
men, faithful to their wives, affectionate to 
their children and relatives and wllllne to 































THE GLASS TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


67 


buy enough to eat and drink. They go in for 
some things that Americana do not use, fine 
French cheese, for instance. The wives are 
Industrious in their way, but it isn’t a good 
way, because there are so few results. As 
cooks they are not celebrated. Quick meals 
are the rule, rather than good ones. Indi¬ 
gestion is responsible for many shortcomings, 
but poor living appears to agree with these 
people. They are dull and stingy, but honest 
and willing. Hardly two arrests of Belgians 
occur a year in Charleroi. It is the larrikins 
from the coal mines, the shovel works and 
the blown glass factories who get themselves 
Into the lock up. 


BACHELORS 
LIVE IN HERDS. 


The Belgians, when 
they are bachelors, are 
just as willing to live 
in a herd as the Slo¬ 
vaks are. They board for as little as possi¬ 
ble, and in order to reduce expenses to the 
lowest they often club together and buy food, 
and also sleep twenty in a house until the 
owner hears of it and routs out a dozen of 
them. In one house thirty-two Poles were 
domiciled, most of them sleeping on hay on 
the floor, with old quilts and blankets about 
them. That party, also, was broken up. One 
of the unpleasant features in the economy of 
these people is their willingness to lie their 
children into factories. There are smutty 
nosed little Walloons and Huns in the blown 
glass shops that you would certainly say were 
not more than 10 or 11 years old, but their 
parents have sworn that they are over 13 and 


came to nothing, and more recently an at¬ 
tempt was made by outsiders to organize the 
men into a labor union. The people who 
made that attempt are not popular. The re¬ 
sult of it was the discharge of every member 
of the union on the very next morning. The 
men say that the foremen played the spy, and 
pretended to go into it themselves, in order 
to secure the names of all who joined, and 
then reported them to the company. 

But while the attitude of the company to¬ 
ward its people is distant, it must be credited 
with one or two good things. It has organized 
the Pittsburg Plate Glass Company Beneficial 
and Athletic Association. In Ford City the 
athletic part of it does not come to much, and 
it has a Shooting Club, a Singing Society and 
two bands instead; but in Charleroi the club 
has a gymnasium, with the usual wooden 
horses, punching bag, wrestling mat, rings, 
ladders and other apparatus on which youth 
immolates itself with enthusiasm. It has 
rooms opposite the factory, and though it is 
open to any solvent, sober and duly elected 
member, there are but 20 of its 370 members 
who are not glass workers. The rooms are 
open from 2 to 10 daily, and are in charge of 
a superintendent, who keepi-s track of the 
books and enforces the rules against scuffling, 
swearing, gambling and assassination. These 
rooms are large, airy, cheerful, and are pro¬ 
vided with gas and heat. They have carpets 
and comfortable furniture. For the Belgians 
there are papers in French and for the others 
there are papers and magazines in English. 



BRICK HOUSES, $10 A MONTH, CHARLEROI, PA. 


have had sufficient schooling. These cubs 
make $3.50 .\ week as helpers, and when they 
ere a little bigger they can earn $5 by filling 
the annealing kilns. 

An average wage in the plate glass works 
is $1.75 a day. The highest is $3, and the 
lowest, for labor, is $1.25. A head layer 
makes $70 a month. Two shifts are run, and 
the work is continuous from midnight on Sun¬ 
day until midnight on Saturday. In the layer 
hall, men are partly on day work, but in 
grinding and poliahlng they work by the piece. 
As a man is paid only for “salable” glass, 
half of his wages may be lost through a crack 
or a smash. Wages have been raised very 
slightly since the trust was formed, but this 
gain has been offset by many dismissals, so 
that six men now do the work that was for¬ 
merly done by eight. Six or seven years ago 
there was a strike for higher wages, but it 


Though the library at present contains not 
quite 700 volumes, they are excellently chosen, 
both for reading and reference. Two rooms 
are set apart for card and checker players. 
The gymnasium where the lads practice on 
one another’s noses is the most popular room. 
If the scrapping grows too earnest, or if the 
onlookers, in egging on the contestants, use 
language which they do not use in Sunday 
school, the superintendent steps in and re¬ 
stores calm. There used to be music once in 
a while, and it was the Intention to have a 
band concert every Saturday; but it is hardly 
necessary to say that he who is alive to the 
harmony of sound Is an inharmonious being 
in his relations with his fellows; so, after the 
Plate Glass Band had been duly rehearsed and 
uniformed, at the expense of the association, 
and had played in public once, at a flag rais¬ 
ing, it up and died. The alleged reason for 


the demise is that every member thought he 
was It, and wanted to lead the band. Moths 
are in the gaudy raiment of the musicians 
now, and green rust is in the throats of the 
trombones. There is left only a man who 
sings, and he thinks more of his music than 
ever. 

SICK BENEFIT Thlssoclety of work¬ 
ers has a good ar- 

WELL MANAGED. rangement for sick 

relief. Each mem¬ 
ber pays $1 a month—outsideVs half as much; 
but they cannot draw on the sick fund—and 
this insures medical and surgical aid in case 
of Illness or injury, not merely for himself, 
but for any member of his family. If he dies 
his associates are assessed 50 cents each for 
his widow’s benefit, and if his wife dies the 
members pay 25 cents apiece to insure a fit¬ 
ting funeral. About 40 per cent, of the $1 
charge goes for the maintenance and increase 
of the library and the rest pays for the ser¬ 
vices of three physicians, who are known ae 
the company doctors. They work for their 
money. When a boy of the polishing depart¬ 
ment broke his leg recently and was confined 
to the house for seven weeks, he was visited 
by the surgeon two and three times a day. In 
spite of the tendency of men to grow careless 
in work that has become familiar to them, 
they rarely suffer from burns in the glass 
works. The more usual accident is caused by 
cutting with glass, and the engineer sounds 
an emergency whistle when there is need of 
the doctor. One of the three of him is sura 
to be there in a minute. 

It used to be said that glass workers wer* 
short lived, but they are a healthy looking lot, 
in the main. Said one of them: “There’s no 
disease incident to glass blowing or glass 
making that I know of—leastwise, nothing 
more than booze.” Careless men sometimes 
have colds and even pneumonia, however, be¬ 
cause they go from the heat of the oven rooms 
into the winter air without sufficient cloth¬ 
ing. 

In Ford City, where the conditions ars 
practically the same as in Charleroi, there is 
much typhoid fever. It was but lately that 
drainage was introduced in that town, and 
hundreds of houses have no plumbing yet. 
Even surface drainage is neglected and only a 
few strips of street are paved. The plate 
glass shops are immense affairs, over half a 
mile in length, and there are 64 acres under 
cover. About 600,000 square feet of glass are 
made here in a month. This is a new town of 
5,000 people, and is named after John B. Ford, 
whose statue was erected eight years ago in 
its little park by 3,000 of his employes. It 
represents a shrewd looking person who is 
described as “the father of the plate glass in¬ 
dustry in America.” He is elderly and stub¬ 
born, they say, and having quarreled with his 
business associates has gone off to Ohio, leav¬ 
ing affairs in the hands of a land company, 
that again, was a virtual branch of the glass 
company. He had nearly finished a library 
building that he was going to give to the 
place, but after his quarrel he abandoned it, 
saying he would tear it down before he would 
open it. There are no books in the town ex¬ 
cept such as people own personally. 

The company has put up a thousand houses 
and they are not enough. The glass workers 
are not obliged to live in them, nor are they 
obliged to rent if they prefer to buy. Most 
of them are cheap, and many are flimsy. The 
best of them face the park and are double 
houses of brick, each half containing six 
rooms and renting for $11. Four room wood¬ 
en houses bring $5, but if they have cellars 
and attics they command twice as much. A 
house can be bought for $50 down and $11 a 
month until $900 have been paid, and th« 
company makes money at that, though It dOfS 




































C8 


THE GLASS'TRUST AND ITS EMPLOYES. 


throw in water rents and insurance. There 
are fewer Belgians here than in Charleroi— 
only 125 all told—and they keep by them¬ 
selves. In these small communities where 
they meet fewer Americans the immigrants 
Americanize less rapidly than In the larger 
towns. They tried here to live at first as they 
pleased, but when the land company found 
eighteen of them sleeping on one floor, men, 
women and children together, it put a stop to 
It. There are among the laborers Huns, 
Slavs, Poles, Irish, Italians and negroes. The 
American workmen save little, but they live 
as well as they can, and some men dress on 
$15 a week in a way to surprise a stranger. 
The Belgians save a little more, and the Poles 
and Slavs more still. The Italians save 
everything. There are no Swedes in the glass 
factories hereabout, as yet. 

If a man has been 

GRATUITY FUND honest and faithful 
FOR EMPLOYES. employ of the Plate 

Glass Company penni¬ 
less,’even if he has not opened a bank account. 
It has a gratuity fund for its men and from 
this it gives to an employe a sum equal to 2^ 
per cent, of his wages, when he goes away. 
Thus, a man earning $500 a year, would re¬ 
ceive a check for $100 when he left at the 
end of eight years—and that is a big sum to 
most of these workers. Many of them prefer 
to own their homes, and on the terms offered 
by the various land companies they can do this 
with little skimping. 

Religiously, the great majority of glass work- 
•rs are Catholics. The Roman churches dom¬ 





inate in size and numbers, and in Ford City 
there is a convent school. Excepting the 
Irish and Italians, most of the children go to 
the public schools, however, and their teach¬ 
ers give a good account of them. They fall 
Into American ways easily, and after their 
first or second term will startle their asso¬ 
ciates by appearing in the class rooms washed 
and with their hair combed clear of all ex¬ 
traneous associations. And when they are 
washed they are just as good as anybody’s 
children. Why, there are little French maids 
who are simply angelic—so sweet faced, de¬ 
mure, soft voiced. As to the boys—well, there 
being nothing good to say of any boys, so let 
it be recorded that these are boys, and let It 
go at that. Yet their teachers say that they 
are mdre polite, obedient and tractable than 
Americans. 

In Charleroi, where there are 900 children in 
the schools, 60 per cent, are foreign born, or 
were born of immigrant parents. They apply 
themselves to their work, and occasionally 
puzzle their teachers by acting like 
children in Sunday school books. One little 
Belgian boy, for instance, read seven Amer¬ 
ican histories one winter, when he might just 
as W'ell have been outside breaking windows 
and Icing church steps. The principal of the 
largest school says: “There are fewer dull 
children here than in any place I have ever 
been in, and I have taught for twenty years. 
The people here work. There is no place for 
drones. We have no pauper class. Last Christ¬ 
mas the churches took up a collection for the 
poor and only two families applied for the pro¬ 
ceeds. That is not bad for a town of 6,000. 


\ 


The foreigners are anxious to get their chil¬ 
dren into school, but they are also anxious to 
get them out just so soon as they think they 
will able to earn a dollar or two.’’ 

The Belgian children are generally taken out 
of school at the entrance* to the grammar 
grade, and put to work. Their parents are al¬ 
leged to be indifferent to education and many of 
them are illiterate. Sometimes the children.are 
a little ashamed of their parents’ ignorance 
and have to invent all sorts of reasons for 
their failure to sign reports. The boys and girls 
know less when they enter school than the 
American children do, and they have the ad¬ 
ded difficulty of being obliged to talk in a 
language they have not completely mastered, 
but they soon catch up. The laboring classes 
are uneasy, and are coming and going all the 
time, and this fact injures the chances of the 
children for proper and continuous schooling. 
That the majority of these little ones manage 
to acquire an education that enables them to 
do work which cannot be done by their par¬ 
ents, that it Inspires them with new and 
broader ideas than they Inherit, that it creates 
an allegiance In them for what is best in 
this country, that it makes them brighter, 
more cleanly, more moral, is a fact that dis¬ 
pels many of the dismal apprehensions created 
by the lack of restraint in immigration to 
America. The assimilative power of this re¬ 
public is wonderful, and perhaps, after all, 
this constant infusion of new blood is the best 
national tonic and the best assurance of en¬ 
during powen 




f 


: I' >' 












The 


Brooklyn 

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E25 1900 


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